


Not Fade Away

by MaCall (misterpointy)



Series: Zreaks of Nature: A Post-Apocalyptic Fairytale [4]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Disability, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, For Science!, Gen, Minor Character Death, Multi, POV Original Female Character, POV Third Person Plural, Porn with Feelings, Present Tense, References to Leverage, Season/Series 04, Season/Series 05, Stealth Crossover, Virology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-02-15 16:05:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 70,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13034640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misterpointy/pseuds/MaCall
Summary: What have we learnedthat will do us any good, standing here on the brink of fire and flame,of disaster, of zombie movie dystopia and plague and final girls?What will we hold onto? At the end all we have is ourselvesand sometimes not even that. We must be our own saviors.—Jeannine Hall Gailey, “At the End of Time (Wish You Were Here)”It’s been six months since the fall of Woodbury and things at the prison are thriving, but nothing gold can stay. Lucy Dixon—née Orville—is about to witness a series of unfortunate events that begins with an influenza pandemic and escalates into close encounters with a cabal of cannibals out for her blood, a hospital full of lawless cops, and a man with a mullet who claims he has a way to cure the zombie virus on a global scale. Welcome to the new age.Fourquel toLiving Dead Girl,Something for Nothing, andLet Us Prey.





	1. My Girl

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING** : THIS IS THE FOURTH PART OF A SERIES. IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE FIRST, SECOND, OR THIRD PARTS, YOU WON’T HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON HERE. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. **BEWARE**.
> 
> (1) Series title is a reference to _Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things_ (1972). Story and chapter titles are titles of songs by the Rolling Stones.
> 
> (2) Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or undead, is purely coincidental.
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
>    
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : This chapter is a smutty one, since it’s pretty much an interlude about Lucy and Daryl on their wedding night. For those of you that aren’t here for porn, don’t worry. There is a decent chunk of introductory plot, too. **Beware**.
> 
>  **Additional Tags** : Rough Kissing, Biting, Foreplay, Breastplay, Nipple Play, Nipple Licking, Vaginal Sex, Cunnilingus.

**In this story, you don’t need to be saved.**  
**In this story, your mother raised you to recognize a prison from a home.**  
**In this story, they don’t fall in love with you before they know you.**  
**In this story, they aren’t better than you.**  
**In this story, you have claws.**  
**In this story, happily ever after has bite marks in it.**  
**In this story, you are free and terrifying.**  
**In this story, you get away.**  
**In this story, you bleed.**  
**In this story, you survive.**

Caitlyn Siehl, “In This Story”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 1**  
My Girl

* * *

_Friday, 23 September 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 467._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

It’s been almost five months since the fall of Woodbury, and things at the prison—now a fortress they named Sarpedon after the island where Medusa lived and died in versions of the myths told about her by Aeschylus and Hesiod, among others—are thriving. There are sixty-six people in their motley crew now, including Zach, Chloe, Henry, David, Charlie, and Patrick, the group of college students Caleb had found at Emory University during his raid; Julio, a middle-aged Puerto Rican mechanic who’d been starving to death in his shop along with his boyfriend Noris and Noris’ teenage son Corey; Ryan, Lizzie, and Mika, a widowed father and his two young daughters; and Tara, her sister Lilly, and Lilly’s daughter Meghan, a family of three who ended up stuck in their apartment building until Lucy and Daryl cleared it out.

Nico and Alec built motion-activated aerosolizers and installed them in the barricade of shipping containers around the fence to spray the zombies in the trenches with diluted blood Lucy drained out of the Governor after she shot him in the face and donated his body to science. There are enough solar panels on the rooftops of the buildings in the complex to power the entire fortress and keep things running like a well-oiled machine. Daryl has been out hunting almost every day so they can freeze and smoke enough meat to last through the winter. Hershel is overseeing their autumnal harvest and sowing the seeds of crops that can grow outdoors in winter: Swiss chard, asparagus, onions, shallots, garlic, spinach, radishes, cabbage, beets, arugula, rutabagas, broccoli, cauliflower, parsnips, turnips, beans, peas, raspberries, and cuttings from a damson tree. Anton, who’s in charge of their greenhouse, is overseeing the planting of tomatoes, winter lettuces, carrots, upland cress, and mustards. Rick has been dragging a reluctant Carl out into the fields to farm and look after the horses, sheep, pigs, goats, and cows they’ve accumulated during their sweeps instead of letting him take watch or set foot outside the fence.

Andrea and Michonne are in charge of the team of supply runners sent to scout the search grids before Sasha and Tyreese come in with their crew to mow down the zombies shambling in the streets with a fire truck. It was only a matter of time before they started dating again, and they promised each other to work on their issues together instead of apart. Amy has been learning as much as she can from Dr. Alice Stevens, who had been working at a hospital in Atlanta as a chief surgeon pre-apocalypse—the first black woman to hold the position in the history of that hospital. Gilda is making textiles—weaving fabric, carding wool sheered from the sheep, and spinning the wool into yarn—and salvaging as many skeins and bolts of material from craft stores as humanly possible to form a knitting, crocheting, and quilting circle that includes the survivors from Woodbury: Luisa, Randolph, Jeanette, Eileen, Cait and Greg, and their children Eryn and Owen. There won’t be any shortage of socks, gloves, mittens, scarves, ponchos, sweaters, and blankets come winter.

Glenn and Maggie are in charge of another team of supply runners, since they’ve been clamoring to gather as much as possible so they won’t have any shortages over the winter. Beth has been out hunting with Daryl, learning to track and field dressing her kills with the efficiency of a farmgirl who grew up slaughtering chickens and sometimes pigs. Hershel didn’t want his daughter to put herself in danger, but he couldn’t say no because she turned eighteen over the summer and she’s one of the lucky few with synthetic immunity stuck in her system. Beth had a thing for Daryl for about a month and it made him feel uncomfortable around her because a barely legal teenager is still a teenager and he didn’t want a kid crushing on him, but then Caleb brought the college students in and she met someone her own age.

Gert, Morgan, Eliot, and Alisha are in charge of guard duty and voluntary basic training in weapons or hand-to-hand combat. Duane has been looking after the livestock, but unlike Carl he actually loves milking cows and goats and sheering wool in spite of how mean sheep can be. Jacqui has been supervising the sweeps and helping Nate map out his plans for expansion, plans they’ve implemented to wall off more farmland with shipping containers and make their fortress into a settlement. Carol and Sophie are teaching the younger kids—Sophia, Julie, Luke, Molly, Noah, Lizzie, Mika—basic survival skills, from how to hold a knife to ways of bamboozling your enemies with only your sparkling personality. Rick doesn’t approve, but he’s not in charge so his opinion doesn’t matter.

Cath is the person who keeps things running, the one who makes the schedules and checks the inventory and talks to people who aren’t happy with their workload or are struggling to adapt. T-Dog and Karen volunteered to supervise their pit crew, a duty everyone does at some point because the zombies pile up out in the trenches and die all over again—it’s a dirty job, but it needs to get done. Kate has been going out with the supply runners to scavenge and stockpile medicine, but most hospitals and pharmacies they’ve raided were picked clean months ago so they’re short on everything from antibiotics to anti-inflammatories. Parker, Dulcie, Neeley, and Toby are part of a crew that goes out scavenging libraries and museums to preserve texts and other artefacts. Which is a priority for Lucy, who’s still an archivist at heart.

Emory had a genetic sequencer that had been damaged beyond any hope of repair in the panic that ensued at the beginning of the global outbreak, so Caleb and Milton weren’t able to salvage the most important piece of equipment Lucy needs for their research. Lucy is still reluctant to raid Georgia Tech, because she’s worried the people who massacred the Vatos gang are still occupying Atlanta. There are signs all along the railroad tracks promising _Sanctuary for All, Community for All_ at a place called Terminus, but since they haven’t seen any other survivors for three hundred miles it’s safe to assume that whoever put up the signs is dead and gone.

Lucy is dead wrong to assume that, but what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Yet.

* * *

Lucy and Daryl get married on the night of the autumn equinox. It’s not an elaborate ceremony, just an exchange of short but sweet vows and wedding bands that bleeds into a dinner party in the courtyard with a feral hog that Daryl speared roasting on a spit and a brew of hard cider that Eliot made on the menu. There’s no Butcher of Kiev to wreak havoc in the kitchen, no fancy hors d'oeuvres or mobsters dealing with dirty money. Love is festooned in the crisp air, in spite of the lingering stench of diluted blood and decay in the pits dug into the dirt around the home they made out of a prison. Lucy baked a bunch of cupcakes in different flavors: buttermilk, vanilla, angel food, red velvet, sweet milk and bitter dark chocolate, all from scratch. Hoarding cocoa powder for winter had never seemed like a better idea. Cath peeled the russets she planted for her and boiled them so the bride could feast on mashed potatoes with an obscene amount of garlic mixed in. Daryl, who called dibs on the feet of the wild pig because he likes to eat them pickled, doesn’t give a fuck about tasting garlic on her breath and in her mouth. Nothing short of another apocalypse could stop him from kissing her every chance he gets.

“Still can’t believe I married a fuckin’ vegetarian,” he says before he burns a soft kiss into the stubborn curve of her chin.

Lucy shivers as a bolt of heat shoots down her spine to coil between her legs and rolls her eyes at him in spite of how badly she wants to kiss him anywhere and everywhere. “I have an alpha-gal allergy,” she points out. “I’m not a vegetarian by choice.”

Daryl nods brusquely and smirks at her in his crooked way, one corner of his mouth unfurling softly. “Let’s hope our kids don’t get that crap from ya’,” he murmurs and hunches to kiss the corner of her mouth before he starts chowing down on his prime cut of sirloin.

Lucy gulps and tries not to freak out about how casual he was, bringing up the possibility of them having kids like that. Daryl has never broached the subject with her, but a blind man could see that he wants her to have his babies. Lucy is still the worst at social cues, but she can read Daryl like a book. It’s in his eyes whenever he sees her with her niece Rita, or Andre, or Judith, or Sarah—the baby Eileen was carrying as a surrogate pre-apocalypse that was adopted by Nate and Sophie after the fall of Woodbury—or beating Duane at chess, or letting Sophia help her catalog the books in their library, or talking to Carl about how going numb in the aftermath of his traumatic experiences in the post-apocalyptic wasteland doesn’t make him a monster.

Daryl is good with kids, too. Seeing him with a baby in his lean muscular arms always does weird things to her ovaries. Lucy knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would be a great dad, even though he probably feels insecure about parenthood because his father was a piece of shit. Trouble is, she doesn’t think she would make a good mom. Romy the corgi is all she can handle, and her dog is out in the fields with the farmers more often than not because she likes jumping in with the sheep to herd the ewes around their pen.

 _We got married two hours ago_ , Lucy thinks as her anxiety churns in the bottomless pit that flourishes in her stomach. _I need to calm my tits. We have all the time in the world to repopulate the earth, even at the end of the world_.

* * *

Daryl scoops her up and carries her over the threshold into their apartment behind the circulation desk later that night. Lucy chortles and buries her face in the crook of his neck, her shoulders quaking with her quiet laughter as she plants a sucking kiss on the column of his throat. Daryl groans and unceremoniously drops her onto their bed so she bounces on the mattress while he shucks his biker vest. Lucy rises up onto her knees and starts unbuttoning his shirt as she licks from the hollow of his throat to the divot behind his left ear, sucking on that soft spot before she tugs his earlobe in between her teeth. Daryl growls low in his throat and yanks at the buttons on the back of her dress.

Lucy didn’t want to wear a wedding gown because white has never been her color. Hell, the engagement ring he got for her is set with an emerald-cut ruby—her birthstone—because she thinks colorless diamonds are beautiful, but boring in a flawless sort of way. Cath talked her into a vintage dress in a soft pearlescent gray to match her eyes. It suits her better than any shade of white, but he still couldn’t wait to get her out of that dress. When he peels it over her head and throws it onto the floor, his mouth goes dry at the sight of what his wife is wearing underneath. Nothing white, just scraps of black silk and lace.

“Shit,” Daryl hisses and stares down at the garter belt clipped to her shimmery black stockings with shiny ribbons that stand out against the pale freckled skin of her soft thighs. “Lucy, you’re killin’ me.”

Lucy shrugs, one-shouldered. “I don’t think a little death is going to kill you,” she deadpans as she palms his cock through his pants and squeezes hard enough to make him twitch in her hand.

Daryl hunches to kiss her neck and helps himself to a handful of her plump ass while she undoes his fly and tugs his pants down. When he crouches to take his shoes off, he stays on his knees in his underwear and stares at her with his pupils blown wide and dark. It’s the look of a hunter, perspicacious and predatory. Daryl can smell her arousal, a sweet musky scent that drives him crazy. It’s mouthwatering, intoxicating, breathtaking. Daryl holds her gaze while he curls his calloused fingers into the hollows behind her knees and drags her onto the edge of their bed. “You’re sexy as hell, darlin’,” he murmurs and smooths his hands up from her thighs to linger on her waist before he cups her breasts in his hands and hunches to lick along the trim and trapping of lace where her balconette bra meets her soft freckled skin. “How’d I get so lucky?”

Lucy bites her bottom lip to stifle a litany of lewd moans as his thumbs swirl around her nipples until the little nubs are hard and even the smallest of touches makes her ache to feel him inside of her. “I’m the lucky one,” she tells him softly.

Daryl scoffs and unhooks the clasp of her bra with a deft flick of his fingers. “Nope,” he retorts, “you’re smart, you’re tough, you’re sweet when you think no one’s lookin’…” he smirks as her blush trickles down to her chest and cups her face in one hand to stroke her flushed cheek with his thumb before he adds, “…and you’re the prettiest damn thing I ever saw. I used t’ think you wouldn’t let me touch you if I was the last man on earth.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and looks him in the eyes. “I’m not with you because of the apocalypse,” she informs him matter-of-factly, “and you can touch me anywhere you want.”

“Oh,” Daryl says and cups her breasts in his rough palms while he rubs her nipples in between his thumbs and forefingers to coax another soft noise out of her, “is that so?”

Lucy arches her back and bites her bottom lip again to hide a smile as her husband breaks eye contact to stare down at her tits in his hands, his skin a warm shade of beige in contrast to her pale flesh sprinkled with old stretch marks and light freckles. Daryl hunches to take one of her nipples into the heat of his mouth and bites down before he sucks hard enough to make her grab his hair. When he hums low in his throat with his mouth on her, her pussy throbs and she can feel her arousal seep out of her to soak through her panties. “Daryl,” she moans softly.

“Yeah,” Daryl grunts and ducks his head to nuzzle her belly, “keep sayin’ my name like that.”

When he tugs her panties off with his teeth, Lucy is happy that she made a habit of wearing them on top of her garter belts so she could pee without the hassle of undoing the straps clipped onto her thigh-highs. Daryl spreads her legs and buries his face in between them, nuzzling the soft thatch of glossy dark curls at the apex of her thighs with his nose before he pinches her clit gently with his thumb and forefinger and swirls his tongue into her hole. Lucy squirms while he holds her down and gorges himself on the sweet and sour taste of her, the flat of his tongue stroking every fold and crease of her sopping wet pussy. Daryl hums low in his throat and that noise is enough to make her clench tight inside. When he slips two fingers into her, he stops pinching her clit and takes it between his teeth. One suck and a rough lick is all it takes to make her come undone, muffling a scream that sounds like his name in the hollow of her palm and squirting all over his chin and cheeks like she does sometimes. Daryl groans and gently bites down on her clit to make her come again. Lucy shakes and shoves him away because the swollen nub is oversensitized in the aftermath of five serial orgasms.

“Too much for ya’?” Daryl asks her with his smirk audible in the smug twang of his voice before he licks his lips and wipes at the mess she made all over his face as best he can with the back of his hand.

Lucy exhales a vociferous whoosh of air. “Not enough,” she pants and rolls onto her stomach in spite of the quivers trembling all through her thighs. “Just don’t touch my clit again.”

“Yes ma’am,” Daryl says in a low drawl.

Lucy adjusts her glasses to stop them from going cockeyed and lets him put his hands on her hips so her fat ass is sticking out for him, since his pubic bone can’t touch her clit while he fucks her from behind. Daryl thumbs where the lace of her garter belt meets the soft flesh of her hips and hunches over her to kiss her neck before he rubs the blunt tip of his cock up and down her slit. Lucy whimpers at the sensation of him stretching her open, his first thrust slow and sure. Daryl bottoms out inside of her with a groan that gusts hot over the back of her neck and puts his weight on her so her back is flush against his chest, both of their bodies slick with sweat. Lucy has another, quieter orgasm because he knows what spots inside her to hit while he fucks her hard and rough and deep. When he comes, he growls and sinks his teeth into the crook of her neck. Lucy clenches around him like a vice as his cock goes soft inside her.

“Mine,” Daryl murmurs and nuzzles the nape of her neck while he soothes the sting of his teeth with the flat of his tongue.

Lucy muffles a yawn in the hollow of her palm and squirms out from under him because she needs to pee and the last thing she wants is a yeast infection in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. “Yours,” she says.


	2. Salt of the Earth

**It’s October, though the season before dawn is always winter. On the**  
**city streets of this desert town lit by chemical yellow travelers search for home.**

 **Some have been drinking and intimate with strangers, others are**  
**escapees from the night shift, sip lukewarm coffee, shift gears to the other side of darkness.**

 **One woman stops at a red light, turns over a worn tape to the last**  
**chorus of a whispery blues. She has decided to live another day.**

Joy Harjo, “Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 2**  
Salt of the Earth

* * *

_Wednesday, 26 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 500._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

Lucy has a box of photographs that she kept in her metal teardrop of a trailer, hundreds of pictures she collected the summer her parents tried to clear out all the clutter in their basement and found packets of developed photographs they never had time to put in photo albums. After she filled up every photo album they had lying around, she boxed up the pictures she liked best and hoarded them for herself. When she ended up stranded a few thousand miles away from home in Atlanta, she didn’t want to look at them because they would make her remember the people she left behind.

It’s Neeley’s idea to make a memorial wall using the photographs of their older siblings, their parents, their aunts and uncles, their cousins, their niece and nephews. Daryl hunted down a Polaroid of Merle from a biker bar where they got wasted and played darts every night for years. It spiraled into a collection of corkboards tacked with pictures on the stone wall facing the cells in C block from there. Lucy and Neeley get a board to themselves because their family was ginormous pre-apocalypse—thirty-six of the names on the _in memoriam_ list are people they had known and loved.

Lucy stops to light one of the candle stubs in a bowl on the desk under the memorial wall and blow it out to make a wish. It’s Stella’s fiftieth birthday, even though she can’t be here to celebrate with her. Hell, she could be throwing herself a post-apocalyptic birthday party in the Emerald City for all she knows. It doesn’t make Lucy miss her sister any less.

* * *

Daryl had gone to check on a superstore they found a few weeks ago early that morning, to make sure none of the migratory hordes in the area shambled through the hole they made in the fence the army had ostensibly set up around the makeshift evacuation center at the store before they got overrun during the night. It took a while for them to clear the place out and even longer to drag the helicopter that had crashed during a failed attempt to evacuate off the roof of the building, but they couldn’t risk leaving the wreckage looming over them with all the water damage on the rooftop accumulated over a year and a half of sporadic intervals of inclement weather and disrepair. Too much could’ve gone wrong if they left well enough alone, and they didn’t want to take any chances with the lives of their people.

When he rides back through the heavy metal gates of the fortress, Daryl parks his bike in the shadow of the innermost watchtower and shrugs his jacket and vest off before he goes to meet his wife for breakfast in the courtyard. Eliot set up a temporary outdoor kitchen because the hitter is redoing the kitchen inside, hooking up all kinds of high-tech equipment and top-of-the-line appliances he scavenged that would’ve gone to waste otherwise.

“Morning, Daryl!” Caleb says.

Daryl squints at the geneticist as a slant of sunlight gets in his eyes. “What’s up, Dr. S?” he asks.

Julio waves to him. “Hola, Daryl,” he says before he turns back to Dulcie and Neeley.

Daryl smiles at his sister-by-marriage, who’s happily chatting away in Spanish with the mechanic while her husband feeds Rita spoonfuls of oatmeal. Neeley is fluent and Lucy can hold a conversation, but it’s nice for Dulcie to have another native speaker around. Julio is Puerto Rican, but he moved to Mexico as a teenager before he came across the border in his midtwenties so the dialect he speaks is hybridized.

“Morning, Daryl!” Greg calls out as Eryn and Owen put down their spoons to wave at him.

Daryl slumps his shoulders in a subconscious attempt to make himself feel smaller. These people are paying a lot of attention to him, and he’s not comfortable with it. Which is weird, because he thought being seen as more than just a good-for-nothing redneck would make him feel better. It sucks, but he still believes he doesn’t deserve that deep down. Daryl had never let himself rely on anyone pre-apocalypse, and he never thought he would end up being the kind of person that other people could rely on.

 _Old habits die hard_ , Daryl thinks and tries to shrug it off by squaring his shoulders.

When he catches sight of Lucy sitting in front of the stove and talking to Carol, the knot in his chest shakes loose. Daryl watches his wife scoop an obscene amount of brown sugar into her oatmeal and smiles more to himself than at her. Lucy doesn’t have a sweet tooth by any means, but she’s big on flavor—she goes through salt and pepper like nobody’s business. Daryl glances down at the sausage on the griddle as more people call out to greet him from the tables scattered around the courtyard. “Smells good,” he says gruffly.

Carol smirks at him. “Just so you know,” she says, “I liked you first.”

Lucy tilts her head to look at him over her shoulder and smiles at him shyly before he puts one hand on her plump face and bends down to kiss her, stroking her cheek with his thumb and savoring the rich taste of dark sugar and molasses on her lips. After he breaks the kiss and reaches around her to grab a handful of sausage from the plate by the griddle, Lucy has to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from grabbing him by the front of his shirt and burying her nose in the dusting of coarse hair on his chest that she can see because he left two of the buttons on top undone to breathe him in because she can’t get enough of her husband. It’s been a month since their wedding and they’re still in the honeymoon phase. “Actually,” she murmurs, “that was me.”

Daryl hums low in his throat, a soft _mm-hmm_. “Y’know,” he says, “Rick brought in a lot of ’em too.”

“Not recently,” Carol points out. “You’ve been giving strangers sanctuary, keeping people fed. You’re going to have to learn to live with the love.”

Daryl snorts. “Right,” he mutters.

“Mr. Dixon,” the fifteen-year-old boy stirring the pot of oatmeal blurts out to fill the silence that ensues, “I just wanted to thank you for bringing that deer back yesterday. It was a real treat, sir. I’d be honored to shake your hand.”

Daryl squints at him before he licks his fingers clean with a string of wet popping sounds and shakes his hand. Carol slants her gaze to Lucy and grins, wide and warm. Daryl thinks he doesn’t deserve love or respect, but they both know better.

* * *

It was only a matter of time before someone in the group missed a period. There’s only so much birth control left in the world, and living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland is stressful as fuck. Gilda, Andrea, Sasha, and Julie don’t have to worry because they’re all trans and they’ve scavenged progesterone and estrogen pills for their hormone replacement therapy, but Zach is another story. There are steroids trans guys can take for androgen replacement therapy, but they’re harder to come by. Oral testosterone wasn’t available in America pre-apocalypse and transdermal forms of testosterone don’t have a long shelf life, so they’re stuck engineering synthetic androgens in the infirmary.

Maggie has been keeping track of her cycle like all of the people at the prison who aren’t taking birth control pills, and missed her last two periods. After she told Glenn, he wanted her to take a pregnancy test. Maggie has been putting that off because she’s terrified, because of Lori, because she’s lost a mother and a stepmother, and she has no idea if she even wants to have a baby. Beth’s the nurturing one. Maggie is the one who killed four people in battle and can’t bring herself to regret that. Glenn also hasn’t been her husband for long, just a few months. It’s too soon for them to start repopulating the earth.

Glenn sits up and swipes one of his hands over his face to knock the sleep out of his eyes. “I don’t think you should go on the supply run today,” he tells her.

Maggie sighs. “We have the suits,” she murmurs. Lucy makes everyone who isn’t immune wear full body armor outside of the fence, although some people wear electrical tape stuck to their clothes so zombies can’t take a bite out of them instead of armor because they don’t have enough tactical gear to go around.

“Yeah,” Glenn says, “but you don’t have to go. You shouldn’t.”

Maggie sits up and strokes his hair. It’s been getting long, curling softly and flopping into his face. “You know everything’s gonna be fine,” she tells him. “Right?”

“Right,” Glenn echoes and smiles at her in spite of the worry gnawing at him before he leans in and kisses her softly, “but you’re staying. Okay?”

Maggie smiles back and shakes her head. “Not a chance,” she says.

* * *

Karen spends most of her time outside the fence clearing the corpses out of the pits, since tattoo artistry isn’t much of a marketable skill in the apocalypse. There’s a funeral home less than a mile away from the fortress with a crematorium in the basement. After they walled off everything in a five-mile radius with shipping containers, they started incinerating the dead instead of burying them in mass graves or burning them in the open air. It’s a dirty job, but Karen doesn’t mind.

Tyreese has seen her splattered with congealed blood and covered in dirt, but that hasn’t stopped him from looking at her like he thinks she hangs the moon. “Hey beautiful,” he says and beams at her like a ray of sunshine.

Karen smiles back and lets him pull her up out of the empty trench. “Hey yourself,” she says.

“Listen,” Tyreese lets go and steps back shyly, “I was thinking of going on that supply run to Big Lots today.”

It’s not exactly out of the ordinary for Tyreese to go on runs, but he and Sasha are part of a team whose main job is sweeping the chunks of Newnan they’ve barricaded with shipping containers and spraying the hordes they find with diluted ichor. Big Lots is over thirty miles out in Griffin, outside the range of the radio system back at the fortress. It’s more dangerous than pit crew or driving the fire truck.

“I don’t like digging them out of the pits,” Tyreese clarifies. “I hate it. I wanna do something different to help out.”

Karen frowns at him, the space between her eyebrows furrowing. “You always volunteered to do it,” she points out.

Tyreese beams at her again. “Yeah,” he says, “because you’re always doing it. I just thought I could get to know you.”

Karen loosely hooks an arm around his neck and kisses him like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “You did,” she tells him. “You be careful out there.”

Famous last words.

* * *

Lucy hobbles over to one of the rigs they’re bringing to Big Lots and sits on the rear bumper while Daryl loads fuel canisters full of biodiesel, a crate of spray cans and grenades full of diluted ichor, and extra ammo for their guns in case their raiding party runs afoul of any unneighborly types into the trailer. It’s a big store in another ghost town, so the number of people going on this supply run is twice as many as their usual teams of six: Lucy, Daryl, Gert, Glenn, Maggie, Beth, Sasha, Tyreese, Andrea, Michonne, Anton, and Zach. Three immunes in one crew to skew the odds in their favor since they’re going to scavenge a place with enough supplies to hopefully last through the winter.

Beth walks out into the sunlight dressed in a charcoal gray tank top that had been a darker shade of black once upon a time on top of a peach-colored camisole and a pair of faded black jeans tucked into her boots, her bare arms unadorned by duct tape or tactical gear because she doesn’t need to wear armor.

Zach smiles at her as she slings the crossbow that Daryl gave her over her shoulder. “Hey,” he says. “I was just going to find you.”

“Hi,” Beth says and smiles back as she leans in for a quick kiss.

Daryl snorts. “It’s like a damn romance novel,” he mutters.

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek as she rolls her eyes at him. “Says the guy who fell in love with me pretty much at first sight,” she deadpans, “and kissed me after I rode out of the woods on a white horse.”

Daryl shrugs and grins at her, a soft twist of his mouth. “Yeah,” he drawls. “I sure did.”

“Hey,” a skinny black man walks through the inner gate as Sasha puts a fireman’s backpack with a tankful of diluted ichor in the back of her rig and waves to get her attention, “I’d like to start pulling my weight around here.”

Sasha puts on a semblance of a smile. “Bob,” she says, “it’s only been a week.”

“That’s a week worth of meals,” Bob points out, “a roof over my head. Let me earn my keep.”

“Weren’t you out on your own when Daryl found you?” Sasha asks even though she already knows the answer.

“That’s right,” Bob says.

Sasha frowns at him, the space between her eyebrows furrowing. “I just want to make sure you know how to play on a team,” she clarifies.

“You know he was a medic in the army,” Glenn says matter-of-factly.

Bob smiles at her. “You’re a hell of a tough sell,” he says. “You know that?”

“It’s not up to me anyway,” Sasha hedges. “Lucy’s in charge here.”

Lucy adjusts her glasses with one hand and idly spins the handle of her cane in between the fingers of the other. “I’m a collaborator,” she says, “not a dictator. You volunteered to run point on this with Daryl. It’s your call.”

“Okay,” Sasha murmurs before she overthinks it. “Let’s go.”


	3. Let It Loose

**There are names for what binds us:**  
**strong forces, weak forces.**  
**Look around, you can see them:**  
**the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,**  
**nails rusting into the places they join,**  
**joints dovetailed on their own weight;**  
**the way things stay so solidly**  
**wherever they’ve been set down—**  
**and gravity, scientists say, is weak.**

Jane Hirshfield, “For What Binds Us”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 3**  
Let It Loose

* * *

_Wednesday, 26 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 500._  
_Griffin, GA;_  
_Big Lots #1617._

* * *

Lucy always gets a thrill from riding on the back of Daryl’s bike. Maybe it’s because her mother had forbidden her from riding a motorcycle under any circumstances and part of her will always be the quite contrary teenage girl who secretly did it anyway, or because she loves basking in the warmth that seeps out of his body while she holds onto him, or because she likes to leave the rest of the world in their dust. When he stops at Big Lots and parks his bike in front of the fence, Daryl brings her hand to his lips and kisses the inside of her wrist before he goes to unravel the cord they used to shut the hole they made in the chain link. Lucy unstraps her skullcap helmet and fiddles with the goggles she looted from a steampunk fashion boutique Kate found back in Atlanta while the group was still camped out at the quarry. There are metal spikes on the sides and they fit over her glasses to keep shit from getting in her eyes while she rides with Daryl at a hundred miles an hour. Cute, but practical—like the girl wearing them.

“Army must’ve come in and put these fences up,” Daryl explains as the others park the rigs and come to stand in front of the fences, “made it a place for people t’ go. When we spotted this place a few weeks ago, there was a bunch’a zombies behind this chain link keepin’ people out like a bunch’a guard dogs.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “Yesterday we hosed down the horde inside the fence, made a sweep to clear out all the zombies inside the building, and filled a rig with supplies,” she adds. “Today we’re here to scavenge everything we couldn’t fit in the back of one semi.”

“All right,” Sasha says, “we go in and fill our shopping carts with everything we can find. Stay on the lookout for medical supplies and nonperishable food, but take whatever you can get. Any questions?”

“Was there ever a time when you weren’t the boss of me?” Tyreese asks as he slings his assault rifle over his shoulder.

“Yes.” Sasha flashes him a wry grin. “You had a few years before I was born,” she quips.

Daryl and Lucy do a preliminary sweep of the store before the others cross the threshold with their shopping carts to scavenge in teams of two—one person to push the cart, one person with a weapon to guard them. Tyreese is with Sasha, Andrea is with Michonne, Anton is with Gert, Glenn is with Maggie, Lucy is with Daryl, and Zach is with Beth. Bob is their odd man out, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“Okay,” Zach says and stops his cart in the aisle behind the Dixons, “I think I’ve got it.”

Lucy turns to look at him over her shoulder as she uses her cane to knock bulk packages of toilet paper from the highest shelf into her cart. “What?” she asks.

“I’ve been trying to guess what Daryl was doing before the Turn,” Zach tells her.

Daryl adjusts his grip on the strap of his crossbow and hunches his shoulders awkwardly as his wife narrows her eyes at him behind her glasses and gives him a look that says _You neglected to mention that_. “Yeah,” he mutters, “he’s been tryin’ t’ guess for like six weeks.”

“I’ve been pacing myself,” Zach says, “one shot a day.”

“All right,” Daryl murmurs and splays the hand he isn’t using to grip the strap of his crossbow over the small of Lucy’s back as she goes on tiptoe to knock down another bulk package of toilet paper. “Shoot.”

“Well,” Zach says, “you’re on the council, you’re able to track, you’re always helping people, but you’re still kind of surly.”

Beth smiles at that. Daryl is more stoic than surly, but the way he squints at things because he’s farsighted and far too stubborn to wear glasses is often misconstrued as him giving certain people the stinkeye.

“I’m gonna take a big swing here,” Zach says, “homicide cop.”

Beth squeaks as she dissolves into a fit of giggles and covers her mouth with one hand to muffle the noise.

“What’s so funny?” Daryl asks.

“Nothing,” Beth tells him as her shoulders quake with the force of her laughter.

“Actually,” Daryl says gruffly, “the man’s right. Undercover.”

Lucy frowns, the space between her eyebrows furrowing. There’s something in the hunch of his shoulders that screams at her. _Zach has been playing this game with Daryl for weeks_ , she thinks, _and he never so much as mentioned it to me. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk about it, but if I know Daryl then it goes deeper than just that_.

“Wait,” Zach says, “come on. Really?”

Daryl nods brusquely. “Yep,” he drawls. “I don’t like t’ talk about it ’cause it was a lot of heavy shit, y’know?”

“Dude,” Zach intones, “come on. Really?”

Daryl arches his eyebrows at him as if to say _Hell no_.

“Okay,” Zach says before he clears his throat awkwardly. “I’m just gonna keep guessing, I guess.”

Daryl snorts. “Yeah,” he mutters as Zach pushes his cart past them and turns into the next aisle, “you keep doin’ that.”

Lucy stops loading bulk packages of toilet paper into their cart and looks him dead in the eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me Zach was playing that game with you?” she wants to know.

Daryl shrugs. “I didn’t wanna talk about it,” he says, “and I ain’t got the heart t’ tell him the truth. I was nothin’ before all this.”

Lucy props her cane against the side of their cart before she puts one hand on the back of his neck to pull him down to kiss him, soft and sweet and slow. After she breaks the kiss, she tugs his bottom lip in between her teeth and sucks hard enough to make him moan low in his throat. “Wrong,” she whispers before she steps back and grabs her cane to knock down a bulk package of paper towels.

Daryl watches her in a daze for a few seconds with a dopey grin on his face and follows her as she pushes the cart further down the aisle. _It don’t matter who or what I was before all this_ , he thinks, _all that matters is that I’m here now. With her_.

* * *

It takes a few hours of scavenging before something goes horribly wrong. Bob goes through the motions of hauling stuff out to the rigs for a while. Then he goes to the wine and beer section of the store and stands in front of a shelf holding a bottle of merlot for a long stretch of time, weighing the pros and cons of getting what he came for. When he puts the bottle of merlot back, he does it with enough force to bring the cabinets of shelves down on top of himself. Zach screams as the top of the cabinet falls on his leg and shatters his femur with a sickening crunch. It’s enough of a commotion that everyone comes running to the scene of the crash.

Daryl crouches and shines his flashlight on where Bob is trapped in the darkness underneath the toppled cabinets. “You all right?” he wants to know. “You cut or somethin’?”

Bob shakes his head slowly. “No,” he says, “but my foot is caught.”

Daryl nods and clicks the flashlight off. “Lucy,” he calls out, “is Zach all right?”

“No,” Lucy informs him urgently, “the cabinet fell on him. I think his leg’s broken.”

Maggie puts her pistol back in the holster on her thigh and kneels next to where her sister is trying to keep Zach calm by letting him hold her hand so tight that her knuckles are going bloodless. “What happened?” she asks.

“I was moving fast,” Bob adds, his voice muffled by the wreckage. “I drove my cart right into the drinks.”

Lucy narrows her eyes at the fallen cabinets. _Bullshit_ , she thinks, _the damage would look different if he’d run into the shelves with a shopping cart. It’s too localized, almost like he broke one of the shelves and brought down the whole set of cabinets on impact. Which doesn’t make any sense, unless he has a problem with alcohol that he took out on the shelves_.

“Hold tight,” Tyreese says as Sasha and Daryl lift the cabinets and shrug the wreckage off, “we’re gonna get you out of there.”

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips in a futile attempt to decompress and taps her earpiece—they can’t talk to anyone at the fortress because they’re out of range, but she has a two-way transmitter in the pocket of her skirt that she can use to talk to anyone listening within a five-mile radius. “Bob knocked down the shelves in the wine and beer section,” she says to everyone on the other end of the frequency, “and Zach is hurt because one of the cabinets fell on him. Anton, there are stretchers out in the parking lot. I need you and Gert to bring one of them for Zach because his leg is injured. Bob, as soon as they get you out of there, you’re going to assess the extent of the damage to his leg and triage it before we try to move him. Beth,” she adds as she turns to look at the blonde girl, “you’re going to take Zach back to the fortress in one of the rigs while we loot the rest of the store. Bob will go with you. I want everyone else to keep scavenging because I don’t want to send another team out here tomorrow. Medusa out.”

Bob clambers out from under the wreckage and crouches next to Zach. “I get it now,” he says as the girl who took the name of a gorgon watches him with her gunmetal eyes.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “What?”

“Why you’re the leader,” Bob tells her. “It’s because you’re good in a crisis.”

Lucy shrugs, one shouldered. There’s a council now—an official chain of command—but she’s the commander. When and if things go wrong, Lucy is still the one who calls the shots. “I am what I am,” she deadpans.

* * *

_Wednesday, 26 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 500._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

After something goes horribly wrong, the rest of the raid goes by without incident and they return to the fortress with ten rigs full of supplies each with at least two huge trailers attached to the semi-trucks. Lucy wasn’t even in the general area of fucking around with her plan to loot Big Lots.

Maggie takes a pregnancy test as soon as she can, sneaking off to grab a stick and cross it out of their inventory. When she sees the blue minus sign, she feels a strange combination of disappointment and pure relief. Maggie wants a baby someday, but now she knows that someday won’t be anytime soon.

Rick took Carl out into the woods to check the snare line while the others went on the supply run. Carl brings his pistol with its makeshift suppressor even though Rick doesn’t want him to carry a gun anymore under any circumstances. After they check the snare line, they run into an Irishwoman who tries to feed them both to the disembodied head of her zombified husband. Carl shoots her in the head and goes to stomp on the yowling head in the burlap sack. There’s something to the theory Lucy has that zombies are losing bone density, because a fourteen-year-old boy shouldn’t be able to crack a skull with his foot.

Zach needs surgery to repair his calf muscle, shredded by the bone fragments from his shattered femur. Amy assists Alice during the procedure with Carol operating as their scrub nurse. There was a private hospital that Blake wasn’t able to raid because it was in his so-called red zone. When their sweeper team cleared the horde of zombies in the streets, they found a trove of medical supplies inside. Otherwise they wouldn’t have anesthesia to put Zach out while they operated on him, or painkillers to give him in the aftermath.

Lucy finds Beth alone in the hall outside the infirmary and folds herself into the chair next to her. “How serious are you about Zach?” she asks.

“How is that any of your business?” Beth wants to know.

Lucy shrugs, one of her shoulders hunching to meet her earlobe. “It’s not,” she says matter-of-factly, “but I need to warn you that everything is about to change in a big way for Zach. When he gets out of surgery, his leg will be held together by pins. I doubt he’ll be able to get out of bed for at least a month, and he’ll never be able to walk normally—” she crooks her fingers like quotation marks around the word _normally_ , “—again. Zach is going to need months if not years of physical therapy, he’ll be wearing a leg brace for the duration of his recovery, and he’s probably going to use a cane for the rest of his life. Unlike me, he doesn’t have all of his friends and his entire family around to support him while he adapts to his new normal. What he’s going through is some serious shit, Beth. It’s going to change who he is as a person, and he’s going to lash out at you or whoever else because he feels incapable and pissed off. Zach is going to get a hell of a lot worse before he gets better. If you’re not serious about him, you need to break up with him so you don’t end up hurting each other in the long run.”

Beth looks up from the pages of her journal and meets her eyes. “You were a survivor,” she says, “before all this happened. You’ve adapted. God knows I have. I’m not going to break up with Zach just because things changed. Now quit treating me like a child and tell me how to help him.”

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek to hide a smile. “I’m not treating you like a child,” she clarifies. “I’m treating you like someone who has no idea how it feels to lose mobility in one of your lower extremities. Which you are.”

“Okay,” Beth says, mollified. “Good.”

Lucy spins the handle of her cane in between her fingers, stimming. “Just don’t abandon him once things get tough,” she murmurs, “don’t hate him for how angry he’s going to be at the world, and don’t pity him or treat him like you think he’s broken.”

“Zach isn’t broken,” Beth tells her softly. “Neither are you.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods succinctly. “I know,” she says, “but thank you for saying it anyway.”

* * *

After she talks to Beth about the hazards of dating someone in the process of adapting to their disability, Lucy finds Bob in his cell at the end of D block and sits in the folding chair by the desk against the stone wall across from his bed. “You lied,” she says. “You came on that run to get a drink.”

Bob guiltily looks down at the floor, but he doesn’t bother to deny it.

Lucy adjusts her glasses and glares at him as nausea roils in her stomach. It’s a familiar sensation, one that means she’s going to toss her cookies soon. “I’m warning you,” she says in her most caustic tone of voice. “If you ever put my people in danger again, I won’t hesitate to shoot you in the face. I’m trying to save what’s left of the world, to prevent the extinction of our species. I have no problem with killing to make sure that happens. Clear?”

Bob gulps. When he came to the fortress a week ago, Daryl brought him to meet Lucy in the library and he saw the heart in a jar on her desk. Bob knows she isn’t making an idle threat, and he blames himself for what happened to Zach something awful. “Crystal,” he says.

“Good,” Lucy bites out before she hobbles out of the cell block and up the stairs to the library to toss her cookies in the privacy of the bathroom she shares with Daryl, who holds her braid to keep it out of the toilet bowl and rubs her back while she pukes.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Fine,” Lucy rasps. “I think it’s just the flu.”

Famous last words.


	4. Citadel

**Everything is tinged with**  
**a sickly sort of pink,**  
**blinking**  
**one**  
**two**  
**three**  
**and still**  
**nothing is clear,**  
**but you still have to keep going.**

 **So,**  
**you do.**

Emily Palermo, “Five Weeks”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 4**  
Citadel

* * *

_Thursday, 27 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 501._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

Lucy spends most of the night throwing up once or twice or thrice every hour, but eventually the vomitorium goes out of business and Daryl lets her fall asleep with her head on his chest—after she brushes her teeth and drinks a metric fuckton of orange juice. While she sleeps, she sweats the fever out. Then she wakes up covered in cold pearls of perspiration and shudders as she peels herself out from in between the sheets. Daryl had to take watch that morning, but he left her bottles of strawberry lemonade, liquid Tamiflu, and vitamin C tablets. There’s still a roil of nausea in her gut and a riot caught in her chest, but after she takes a shower Lucy feels almost human. Until she gets out of the shower to find Sophia waiting for her and clutching the grip of her pistol in one hand, her wide hazel eyes filled to the brim with fear.

Sophia grabs her hand and drags her to D block in time to witness the carnage. Daryl runs in from the other side of the cell block with his crossbow drawn and scoops eight-year-old Luke up with his free arm before he puts a bolt in the eye of the zombie that was trying to take a bite out of the kid. After he hands Luke off to Karen, he runs up the stairs to sweep the second floor of the cell block. Tyreese, Sasha, Glenn, Eliot, Parker and Alisha start evacuating people and clearing out all the zombies on the ground floor in the meantime.

Lucy takes one look at Sophia and shoves her into the cell occupied by Noah, Karen, Luke, and ten-year-old Molly before she slams the door shut with a loud clank. Carol shoots her a grateful look as she locks Mika and Lizzie in with their father, even though he was bitten twice—once on his forearm and again on the back of his neck.

“There’s at least one unit in the minifridge,” Lucy informs her as she draws her machete and slams the blade down to split open the skull of a zombified girl. It makes her muscles scream at her, but she got used to feeling like death warmed over before the world went to hell in a handbasket. “Go,” she orders.

Carol nods and takes off running, but Ryan Samuels is dead by the time she gets back with a bag of chilled blood. Lizzie has a meltdown while Mika hushes her instead of doing the dirty work of stabbing their father in the head to stop him from reanimating. Carol twists the knife and withdraws the blade as a hollow feeling sinks into the pits of her stomach.

 _Chloe_ , Lucy thinks and eyes the zombified girl as squiggles of her brain ooze out of the crack in her head. _Noris_ , she flicks her gaze to the zombified man with a hole in his eye socket courtesy of her husband and his crossbow. _Julio, Greg, and Owen_ , she thinks as she looks at the bodies of the mechanic, the redheaded man and his ten-year-old son. Lucy swallows hard and stabs each and every one of them in the back of the head, even the little boy.

Eliot puts his hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently. Lucy turns to look at the hitter and catches sight of Parker standing next to him with specks of blood splattered on her arms, staining the white fabric of her tank top. “Upstairs,” says the thief. “There’s something you need to see.”

It’s Patrick and Charlie, the brothers that Caleb had found living in the dorms at Emory with a bunch of other college students—including Chloe and Zach. Patrick was fifteen, and he was visiting his brother at the university on the night Atlanta died. Charlie was nineteen, he was getting a degree in chemical engineering, and he was instrumental in helping the group whip up things like homemade bleach. Eileen is dead in the hallway with a bolt in between her eyes and that brings the body count of the massacre to twelve casualties, all told.

Daryl squints at his wife as she hobbles up the stairs. “What the hell’re you doin’ outta bed, darlin’?” he asks her with a soft twang in his voice that he only seems to use around her.

“Sophia came to get me,” Lucy rasps. “What the hell happened here?”

Rick looks over his shoulder at her from inside the cell where he knelt down to examine one of the corpses. “Charlie has no bites and no scratches,” he says, “no wounds. I think he just…died.”

“Horribly, too,” Caleb says gravely. “Pleurisy aspiration.”

“Choked to death on his own blood,” Hershel adds for the benefit of those who don’t know any hifalutin medical jargon. “Patrick died the same way.”

“What caused it?” Eliot asks. “What killed ’em?”

Caleb shrugs. “It could be pneumococcal,” he says, “most likely an aggressive flu strain.”

“Or both,” Lucy murmurs.

Caleb nods. “Or both,” he echoes.

“Someone locked him in just in time,” Hershel says.

“No. Charlie used to sleepwalk,” Daryl says gruffly, “he locked himself in. Hell, he was just eatin’ barbecue yesterday. How could somebody die overnight from a cold?”

Lucy muffles a cacophony of coughs in the hollow of her palm. “I’m going to find out,” she says, “bring the bodies to the library before we start burying them so I can do autopsies.”

“No way,” Daryl says with slow vehemence. “Y’ain’t cuttin’ up a bunch’a disease-bearin’ corpses.”

Lucy huffs. “Daryl,” she sighs, “I’ve been throwing up all night. If this is a flu strain, chances are I’m already infected. I need to swab their noses and throats. Maybe biopsy their lungs. If we’re dealing with a pneumococcal infection on top of a flu strain capable of causing death by respiratory failure, we need to know as soon as possible because secondary bacterial infection was a leading cause of death in every influenza pandemic in recorded history. It’s likely the strain we’re dealing with is a mutated H1N1 strain, like the strain that killed over fifty million people in the Spanish influenza pandemic in between 1918 and 1920 or the strain that killed over seventeen thousand people in between 2009 and pre-apocalyptic 2010.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and just looks at her. Lucy is stubborn, the kind of stubborn that can only flourish in someone who always got her way growing up. If she wants to risk her life by doing autopsies on people who died of some flu strain, he won’t be able to stop her. Worse, he can’t even bring himself to stop her because she just wants to make sure that nobody else is going to die.

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek as she looks him in the eyes and hopes that she didn’t infect him, but chances are she did. “If this is a H1N1 strain,” she adds, “the pigs and chickens might be infected too. Or a zombie in the trenches could’ve died of the flu and someone on pit crew is patient zero. I think we could be looking at our worst case scenario: that the zombie virus is mutating and living in symbiosis with viral infections like influenza or bacterial infections like pneumonia, making undead bodies vectors for other diseases.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Caleb says halfheartedly. “Maybe these two cases are it.”

“I haven’t seen anybody be lucky in a long time,” Bob interjects, “bugs like to run through close quarters.”

“It doesn’t get much closer ’n this,” Eliot says.

“We’ve all been exposed,” Hershel murmurs.

“If we’re talking about an upper respiratory illness,” Lucy rasps and coughs into the curl of her fist before she goes on, “it’s a virus with airborne transmission as the primary vector. Those diseases can incubate for days before the infected become symptomatic. You’re right that we’ve all been exposed,” she flails one hand obliquely to encompass the people in D block, “but so has everyone else in this fortress because we all breathe the same air.”

“Okay,” Parker says and folds her arms tight across her chest, “so what do we do?”

“I want a medical team to sweep the entire fortress and swab everyone,” Lucy informs her. “Carol and Lilly are nurses, so they should run point on this and keep track of things on paper. I want you to use q-tips for nose swabs, put them in plastic bags individually, and label them all. While I test the swabs for pneumococcal bacteria, I want the rest of you to set up three places for quarantine to isolate those with influenza from those with a pneumococcal infection on top of influenza and to isolate the children from the infected so they won’t be exposed to more harmful pathogens until we’ve dealt with this shit. Bob, find Dr. Stevens and help set up IV bags to administer intravenous antibiotics. I’m going to isolate myself in the library. While I do the autopsies, decontaminate the cell blocks with bleach and use the antibacterial wet wipes we have lying around on everything because touching contaminated surfaces is a secondary vector of infection.”

Hershel nods. “We’ve all got our jobs,” he says and that’s all it takes to spring everyone into action. “Let’s go.”

* * *

D block is home to the survivors from Woodbury and everyone they brought in after the weeklong war. Zach wasn’t in his cell because he’s still recovering from his surgery. Alice wasn’t in her cell because she spent the night in the infirmary to monitor Zach instead of making Carol or Lilly do the grunt work. Tara evacuated her sister and niece first thing, and by the time she extricated herself from seven-year-old Meghan the massacre had been dealt with.

Alisha evacuated Luisa before the others, since the former army sergeant has arthritis in her knees and she can’t walk far on her own. Then she got the kids out: Sophia, Luke, Molly, Eryn, Lizzie, Mika, and Noah. Karen had to bring Cait back inside the cell block in the aftermath of the massacre to shroud the bodies of her husband and her ten-year-old son in sheets, a burial tradition that Amy started back at the quarry. Milton got Jeanette and Randolph out of the cell block and found Andrea because the blonde has a knack for crowd control that he sorely lacks. Cath finds a box of q-tips and goes around collecting swabs with her big brown eyes narrowed into slits of concentration and her cartoonishly expressive face crumpled in disgust. Kate is less squicked out by the nose swabs, but no one likes throat cultures.

“What the hell happened?” Nico asks as soon as Rick and Daryl emerge from D block.

Daryl slings his crossbow over his shoulder. “Patrick got sick last night,” he answers. “Lucy thinks it’s some kind of flu, and it moves fast.”

“Patrick died,” Rick adds, “and we think he attacked the cell block. Look,” he lowers his voice and looks at Carl as the others start to talk and freak out amongst themselves, “I know he was your friend and I’m sorry. Patrick was a good kid…” he swallows thickly before he says, “…we lost a lot of good people.”

Daryl whistles to get their attention. “Okay,” he says gruffly, “thing is, chances are we’re all infected. Lucy wants to run diagnostic tests and in the meantime we’re gonna set up quarantine. Nobody goes in D block or the library ’til we get this disease under control.”

“Hershel says we should all wear gloves and a mask to prevent the spread of infection,” Rick says. “If someone could hand those out, that would be helpful.”

“I can do that,” Milton volunteers.

“Why can’t we go in the library?” Nico wants to know.

Daryl clenches his jaw and a frustrated noise unfurls from somewhere deep in his chest. “Lucy’s sick,” he grits out, “she’s been throwin’ up all night and now she’s riskin’ her life t’ find out why Patrick and Charlie died.”

“Lucy was immunocompromised for nine years,” Nico points out, “she’s had the flu hundreds of times. If a viral infection was going to kill her, it would’ve been the zombie virus. Not whatever this is.”

Daryl swallows hard. “I hope you’re right,” he tells her.

Hershel calls an emergency meeting of the council in the commissary to discuss the particulars of quarantine. Lucy is busy dissecting corpses for science and Rick is helping the kids get settled in the administrative building. There are others running damage control and trying to keep people from panicking, they’re a few members short.

Carol puts her elbows on the table in front of her, twisting her fingers together anxiously. “Patrick was fine yesterday,” she says, “and he died overnight. Charlie too. If two people could die that quick, anyone who’s infected is another massacre waiting to happen. It isn’t just the illness. If people die, they become a threat.”

“We need a place for them to go,” Hershel says, “they can’t stay in D.”

Nate furrows his brow, deep in thought. “We can use cell block A for the people infected with the flu,” he suggests, “and put the people with a secondary bacterial infection down in the tombs.”

“Solitary confinement in case they die and reanimate,” Sophie adds. “Separate cells for everyone in A so the infection doesn’t spread any more than it already has.”

“Death row?” Glenn shakes his head slowly. “I’m not sure that’s much of an upgrade.”

“It’s clean,” Daryl murmurs, “that’s an upgrade. You think that’ll work for Dr. S?”

Hershel nods. “I’ll go help Alice and Caleb get it set up,” he says.

When the sound of someone coughing up a storm ricochets into the room, tension fulminates in the air as they all rise up and walk out into the hallway in between the commissary and C block. Tyreese stops in the hall to put an arm around Karen and looks down at her with concern. “You okay?” he asks.

Karen nods and tries to crack a smile, even though she’s coughing too hard to answer his question with her words.

“You sure?” Carol asks sharply. “You don’t sound so good.”

“I’m just taking her back to my cell so she can rest,” Tyreese says as he tightens his grip on Karen without thinking it through.

“Tyreese,” Hershel says and shakes his head as the other man tries to usher his girlfriend down the hallway, “you can’t take her into that cell block.”

Karen frowns at the worried looks on their faces. “Why?” she wants to know. “What’s going on now?”

“Patrick died of a disease,” Glenn says, “We think it’s the flu or something.”

“Rick is putting the children in isolation,” Hershel says, “but Andre, Judith, Sarah, and Rita may still be in C block and they’re all vulnerable. Anyone who’s been exposed needs to stay out.”

“It killed Patrick?” Karen asks, her voice pitching higher in distress. Patrick and her son Noah had been friends, so his death hit a little too close to home.

Tyreese sucks in a sharp breath and tries not to choke on the lump of fear in his throat. “Well,” he says, “she’s gonna be okay. Now that we know what Patrick died from, we can treat it. Right?”

“Don’t panic,” Sophie murmurs in her most soothing voice. “We’re going to figure this out.”

“We’re going to quarantine you in the meantime,” Nate adds. “Caleb or Alice can take a look at you.”

“Bob is seeing what we have in the way of medications,” Sasha says. “We’re short on antibiotics, but…”

“David,” Karen mumbles, “from Decatur, he’s been coughing nonstop too.”

“I’ll get him,” Glenn says and walks down the hall in the opposite direction because he last saw David out in the courtyard behind D block.

Sasha motions for Tyreese and Karen to follow her down the hall away from C block to where the doctors are making their rounds. Lucy has run the diagnostics on the swabs and made a list of everyone who’s infected so they can take people into quarantine.

“You all right?” Daryl asks quietly once he and Carol are the only people left in the hallway.

Carol slumps with her back against the stone wall. “I’m worried about Sophia, and Lizzie, and Mika,” she mutters, “my girls were around Patrick.”

“We all were,” Daryl points out.

Carol nods. “You’re right,” she says before she asks, “are you okay?”

Daryl hums his answer, a soft _mm-hmm_. “I gotta be,” he says gruffly and starts walking down the hallway. “I’mma go see my wife,” he adds, “find out what she knows.”

Carol squares the defensive posture out of her shoulders and falls into step with him. “I’ll go with you,” she says, “the sooner we find out what we’re dealing with, the better.”


	5. Slipping Away

**That’s what sickness is,**  
**a flight of blackbirds;**  
**a ritual.**  
**It’s the body making no sense.**  
**It’s godblood.**

Lisa Marie Basile, “How They Left Us”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 5**  
Slipping Away

* * *

_Thursday, 27 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 501._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

When she performs the autopsies on Patrick and Charlie, Lucy takes her tissue samples from their lungs with biopsy needles so she won’t have to make an incision or crack their chests to look at their pleural cavities. It breaks her heart to have two dead teenagers on the metal gurneys in front of her, but if she gave the order to bury the boys without trying to deduce why they dropped dead she would’ve done more harm than good.

 _Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes_ , Lucy thinks as she peers into her microscope to confirm the results of her diagnostic tests on the biopsies. _I am nothing if not a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants_.

When he walks into the library, Daryl gets an earful of his wife puking in the plastic garbage bin underneath the circulation desk before he sees her on the floor hunched over the receptacle. Carol watches him crouch next to Lucy and rub her back while she keeps her distance to avoid exposure to any stray pathogens. “I thought you stopped throwing up sometime last night,” she says, her voice muffled by the mask covering her nose and mouth.

“I did,” Lucy rasps, “but shoving a giant q-tip down my own throat upset my gag reflex.”

Carol smiles at that behind her mask and it makes her eyes crinkle at the corners. “So,” she murmurs, “do you know what kind of disease we’re dealing with?”

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound. “Patrick and Charlie both had walking pneumonia in their lung tissue, but they weren’t symptomatic yet because Mycoplasma pneumonia has an incubation period of a week to a month. When the flu got into their systems yesterday, it caused the Mycoplasma pneumoniae bacteria to spread at a terrifyingly accelerated rate and that in turn caused the respiratory failure that killed them. Their pleurae were inflamed, like Caleb said.”

Daryl squints at her as she uses her cane to get back on her feet and hobbles over to where she left her throat culture under her microscope. “So that means this flu strain ain’t fatal by itself,” he deduces.

“It’s possible for the flu to bring on death by respiratory failure by itself,” Lucy clarifies. “It’s just a hell of a lot less likely without a secondary bacterial infection.”

“Which is why only Charlie and Patrick died from this,” Carol says.

“Yup,” Lucy echoes and pops the _p_ sound once more with feeling.

Carol slumps her shoulders as she exhales a sigh of sheer relief. “What about you?” she wants to know.

Lucy peers at her throat culture and writes something down in her listography notebook before she answers that question. “I don’t have a secondary bacterial infection,” she informs them. “I still need to perform necropsies on a chicken and a pig to see if they’re vectors of infection, though.”

Carol shakes her head slowly, like a pendulum in a ticking clock. “No,” she says, “you need to rest so you don’t die of respiratory failure.”

“I’ve had walking pneumonia before,” Lucy points out, “chances are this won’t kill me even if I do come down with a secondary bacterial infection.”

“Y’ain’t gonna take no damn chances,” Daryl growls at her, “get your ass back in bed.”

“Fine.” Lucy muffles a yawn in the hollow of one palm and flails her other hand at a textbook she propped open on the wooden table next to her microscope as she hobbles back to their bedroom. “There’s a picture of what Influenza A looks like under a microscope in that medical textbook in case anyone needs a reference.”

* * *

David from Decatur dies later that afternoon. Caleb uses his pocketknife to stop the corpse from reanimating and performs an autopsy to confirm that David had Mycoplasma pneumoniae in his lungs. After that, he shoos the veterinarian out of the tombs and ups the dosage of antibiotics in the IV bags attached to his patients. Alice brings the last of the antibiotics to him a few hours before sundown, and by then he can feel telltale the tickle in his throat.

Rick helps Tyreese, Alisha, Tara, Glenn, Daryl, Eliot, Nico, Hershel, Maggie, Bob, and T-Dog bury their dead in the cemetery by the creek. It’s outside the fence and the pit traps, but inside the five-mile radius of territory walled off with shipping containers. There aren’t many zombies fresh enough or smart enough to get past their defenses these days.

Amy, Carol, and Lilly are assisting Caleb and Alice with patient care. Zach is with the kids in isolation while Beth watches over him. Andrea, Cath, Toby, Kate, Neeley, Dulcie, Milton, Anton, Parker, Nate, Sophie, Gert, Gilda, and Luisa have all been locked away in quarantine even though some of them are still asymptomatic. Michonne and Morgan are keeping watch in the tower by the front gate while Alec monitors the security camera feeds coming in from their solar-powered network of surveillance.

“Everything we’ve been working so hard to keep out,” Hershel says gravely, “it found its way in.”

“No,” Rick mutters, “it’s always there.”

“We lost twelve of our own,” Eliot says. “We could be facin’ an outbreak of a disease Lucy can’t just magically cure.”

Glenn smiles at Maggie, who smiles back at her husband while she keeps her distance from him because he might be contagious. “We’re gonna be okay,” he says. “Right? David was already sick. If any of us were going to get it, we’d would’ve had it by now.”

“It doesn’t happen on a timeline,” Hershel tells him with a somber edge in his voice. “It’s different with everyone.”

Glenn swipes at the sweat on his forehead with one gloved hand. “Yeah,” he says, “but we could be okay.”

“Yeah,” Hershel echoes, “we could be. Everything could be okay.”

Glenn heaves a sigh. “If it’s zombies,” he says, “or it’s people, then we can fight back. But we can’t fight this,” he mutters as he stabs his shovel into the dirt. “All we can do is dig graves.”

* * *

Randolph dies and reanimates in solitary confinement, his zombified corpse yowling and clawing at the door of his cell. After that, other survivors from Woodbury start falling like dominoes: eight-year-old Luke, ten-year-old Molly, twelve-year-old Eryn, her mother Cait, and Jeanette who insists her symptoms are allergies until she coughs up blood and chokes to death. Alisha and Tara go into quarantine as a precaution because they put down the zombified kids and dragged the bodies shrouded in their sheets out of cell block A. Tyreese visits his sister and daughter in the isolation ward before he goes to give a bouquet of wildflowers he picked to Karen down in the tombs. Julie cracks a smile, her lips chapped and throat dry from coughing up a storm.

“It’s spread,” Hershel says grimly. “Everyone who survived the attack in D is showing flu symptoms. We’ve lost five more people in the last two hours.”

“So what can we do to stop it from killing more people?” Carol asks.

“There is no stopping it,” Hershel tells her. “If you get it, you have to go through it.”

Michonne frowns, the space between her eyebrows furrowing. “But it just kills you?” she asks. Andre hasn’t been exposed, but he’s still vulnerable. Michonne doesn’t want to stay in isolation with him when she could be doing something to help the group—including her brother, who’s hooked up to an IV bag full of waning antibiotics in the tombs—but that doesn’t mean she isn’t worried sick about him.

“No,” Hershel says, “the illness doesn’t kill you, the symptoms do. We need more antibiotics to combat those symptoms.”

“We’ve been through every pharmacy nearby,” Daryl points out, “and then some.”

After they won the war with Woodbury, one of the first things Lucy had done was send groups out to scavenge every hospital, pharmacy, drugstore, and clinic in a fifty-mile radius. Unfortunately, most of those places had been raided by the Governor or whoever else. After a bout of summer colds blew through the fortress, their supply of antibiotics and antiviral medication was depleted. Lucy wanted to expand their search grids for medical supplies to a hundred-mile radius, but they’ve been so busy trying to grow and gather enough food to last through the winter that she and the council hadn’t gotten around to sending a team out. It’s not like anyone could have predicted another pandemic that would spread like wildfire. Luckily most antibiotics are still potent for over a decade past their expiration date, so the shelf life of the drugs they desperately need isn’t an issue. Yet.

“There’s a veterinary college at Fort Valley State,” Hershel tells him. “It’s one place that people may not have thought to raid for medication, but the drugs for animals there are the same we need.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “That’s a hundred miles,” he mutters, “too big a risk before. Ain’t now. I’mma take a group out.” At that, he abruptly rises to his feet and slings his crossbow over his shoulder. “Best not waste any more time.”

“I’m in,” Morgan says.

“I can lead the way,” Hershel offers. “I know where everything’s kept.”

“No,” Daryl says gruffly. “I need you here.”

Hershel sighs. After his farm burned down, he and Daryl had fostered a friendship rooted in their shared experience with the fathers who beat them both as children. Hershel has scars too, from a hickory switch instead of a belt. Daryl trusts him with the life of the woman he loves, the woman that needs to survive this sickness at all costs. If she dies, so does any hope of a cure. Rick may be immune, but he’s not smart enough to save the world. “I can draw you a map,” he amends.

* * *

Daryl goes to say goodbye to Lucy and finds her asleep in their bed with her glasses folded on top of the bookshelf next to her, the frizzy tendrils of her hair loose and slithering over her shoulders and a sheen of sweat on her forehead that makes the blunt sweep of her bangs stick to her skin. Lucy snores like a freight train and being congested only makes it worse. Daryl can’t help but smile at the unholy sound coming out of her pretty mouth, and it takes everything he has to stop himself from crossing the room and crawling into bed with her.

 _It’s better this way_ , Daryl thinks and hunches over her to drop a kiss on the burnished crown of her head before he walks back out into the courtyard. _I didn’t wanna say goodbye t’ her. I fuckin’ hate t’ say goodbye_.

Daryl is tempted to take Zach’s Dodge Charger LX out of the machine workshop because with its souped-up V8 engine, it’s the fastest car they’ve got. Nico makes the compelling argument that 370 horsepower and 395 pound-foots of torque won’t matter if the migratory hordes clog the road, whereas a rig can mow down hordes of the undead at any speed.

“Fair enough,” Daryl mutters before he climbs up into the big rig with the aerosolizer on the roof to turn a key in the ignition and check the fuel gauge. “Sumbitch is ’bout a quart low,” he says.

“I’ll go get more gas from Tower One,” Michonne says before she turns back toward the tower overshadowing the inner gatehouse.

“So,” Nico says as Daryl checks under the hood, “it’s me, you, Eliot, and Michonne?”

Daryl nods brusquely. “Yeah,” he says, “and Bob. Morgan’s gonna stay and keep an eye on things. Still, it feels like we could use another person.”

“Okay,” Nico says, “who else isn’t sick?”

“Ain’t gonna ask Rick,” Daryl murmurs, “he wants t’ stay here with Carl and Little Asskicker. Keep ’em safe. Plus there’s plenty of stuff he could do here.”

“So who else we got?” Michonne asks.

Nico shrugs. “I made T-Dog go into quarantine half an hour ago because he started coughing,” she says. “Maggie told me Glenn is sick now, too. We’re dropping like flies.”

Daryl unhooks the strut before he shuts the hood and squints at the former army medic that he found wandering on the highway like some kind of crossroads ghost. “Hey,” he says, “ya’ all right?”

Bob snaps out of the stupor he was in and looks at the hunter with a hint of fear in his eyes. “You really want me coming along?” he asks meekly.

Daryl rustles up the list Hershel made of antibiotics and antiviral medication for treating the flu and pneumococcal infection and points at the name of the first drug. “What’s that word?” he wants to know.

Bob reads the word out loud. “Zanamivir,” he says. “It’s a neuraminidase inhibitor used to treat Influenza A and B viruses.”

“Yup,” Daryl says. “We need ya’.”

* * *

Hershel sneaks out of isolation to gather elderberries with a moody Carl, whose teen angst has a body count. Maggie catches her father in the courtyard outside of A block with a crate of supplies. “Why aren’t you in quarantine?” she asks him with a sharp edge of panic in her voice as her fingers dance anxiously over the grip of her pistol.

“I’m no good to anyone in there,” Hershel says in what he hopes is a soothing voice.

Maggie glares at him, fury evident in her green eyes. “Daddy,” she says, “please—”

Hershel sighs. “Maggie, dear,” he interjects, “there are people in there suffering. I can bring their fever down and keep them stable.”

Maggie sets her jaw and exhales in a huff. “Daryl’s getting more antibiotics,” she says.

“Some of these people won’t last twelve hours,” Hershel tells her soberly.

Maggie shakes her head. “I can’t let you do this,” she says, her voice breaking with every word.

Hershel looks her dead in the eyes and stands his ground. “Maggie,” he murmurs, “Glenn’s in there.”

Rick comes around the corner and glances from the farmer to the farmer’s daughter. “What’s going on?” he wants to know.

“I went out looking for elderberries,” Hershel tells him, “my wife Josephine used to make tea with them because they’re a natural flu remedy. Alice is stuck down in the tombs and Caleb is too sick to help, but I can. There’s been so many times we weren’t able to do anything to change what was happening,” he swallows thickly at the memory of Annette dying in his arms before he says, “what was happening to us. I know we wished we could, but we couldn’t. Now I can. I know I can, so I have to.”

Rick frowns and holds up one hand to stop him. “Hershel,” he says urgently, “if you go in there, you’re gonna get sick.”

“We don’t know that,” Hershel points out. “What we do know is that these people’s symptoms need to be controlled.”

Rick flails his hands in front of him, a halfhearted gesticulation. “Hershel, please,” he says. “We can wait—”

“Listen, dammit!” Hershel shouts at him. “You step outside, you risk your life. You take a drink of water, you risk your life. Nowadays you breathe and you risk your life. Every moment these days you don’t have a choice, and the only thing you can choose is what you’re risking it _for_. Now,” he lowers his voice, “I can make these people feel better and hang on a bit longer. I can save lives,” he says and slants his gaze to Maggie, “that’s reason enough to risk mine. I think you know that.”

Maggie hauls open the door for him and tries to put on a brave face, but in the end she sniffles and chokes back tears as her father turns and walks into A block with a terrible feeling that he won’t come out alive.

* * *

_Thursday, 27 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 501._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_I-75 Southbound._

* * *

Nico drives with Daryl riding shotgun in the passenger seat, his crossbow by his feet underneath the dashboard. Tyreese ended up coming at the last minute, so he’s in the trailer with the others and their sleeping bags. It’s a hundred miles from Newnan to Fort Valley. There’s a good chance this road trip could take all night, and they don’t want to waste time setting up camp somewhere.

Daryl fidgets with one of his arrows for a while before Nico drives by the city and he fiddles with the radio. When the bloom of static turns into words, he almost jumps out of his skin.

“ _Terminus_ ,” the feminine voice on the radio says. “ _Find sanctuary_.”

“Wait,” Nico says incredulously as she takes her foot off the gas, “was that a voice?”

“ _Terminus_ ,” the feminine voice on the radio echoes. “ _Sanctuary for all. Community for all. Those who arrive will survive_.”


	6. All Down the Line

**Looking back is easy for a while and then looking back gets**  
**murky. There is the road, and there is the story of where the road goes,**  
**and then more road,**  
**the roar of the freeway, the roar of the city sheening across the city.**  
**There should be a place.**

Richard Siken, “Road Music”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 6**  
All Down the Line

* * *

_Friday, 28 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 502._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

When the morning comes, Lucy checks in with everyone over the radio and a hollow ache takes root in her chest because Daryl isn’t back yet. If anyone is winning at the apocalypse, it’s them; but that doesn’t mean driving a hundred miles isn’t dangerous. Worse, no one else is throwing up. Just coughing up a storm. Which sets her teeth on edge, because ever since he casually brought up the possibility of them having kids at their wedding Lucy has been terrified of unplanned pregnancy. No type of birth control is a hundred percent effective. There’s a nine percent failure rate for contraceptive pills, and Lucy has always been an outlier.

 _I have the weakest stomach_ , she tells herself, _the vomiting could be psychosomatic_.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips and chugs a tiny cupful of Dayquil before she taps her earpiece. “Amy,” she rasps, “I need you to get me something from inventory.”

“Okay,” Amy says and ekes the _y_ sound out from the other end of the frequency. “What do you need?”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “Strawberry lemonade,” she mumbles, “and a pregnancy test.”

“Wait,” Amy says. “What?”

* * *

Lizzie is brought out of the frying pan of isolation and into the fire of quarantine early in the morning. Carol visits Sophia and Mika before she uses the keys Lucy gave her to unlock A block and stands by the staircase to the cells on the second floor. Lizzie watches her through the bars of her cell and coughs into her fist, a quiet gust of infection.

Carol has a mask and gloves on, so chances are she won’t catch her death from the twelve-year-old blonde girl. “Lizzie,” she says, “are you okay?”

Lizzie nods. “I’m fine,” she mumbles before she abruptly changes the subject to ask, “do you think Daryl is dead?”

Carol shakes her head slowly. “No,” she says without hesitation. “Daryl will come back. It’s only a matter of time.”

Lizzie tilts her head to one side and that makes her look even more childish than she already does, with her wide blue eyes and elfin face. “Nobody’s died yet,” she says.

Carol frowns at that, her forehead crumpling to accommodate the furrowing in the space between her eyebrows. “Yet?” she asks.

Lizzie nods again. “I think a lot of people are going to die,” she murmurs. “It’s what always happens. It makes me sad, but at least they get to come back.”

Carol shakes her head slowly. “Lizzie,” she says, “when people come back, they aren’t who they were.”

“Yeah, but they’re _something_ ,” Lizzie retorts, “they’re _someone_. I’m little now. If I don’t die, I’ll get big. I’ll be me, but I’ll be different—it’s how it is. We all change. We don’t get to stay the same.”

Carol shakes her head again. “Lizzie,” she says, “it’s more complicated—”

“You said I was weak,” Lizzie cuts in sharply. “I’m not. I’m strong, so I’m telling you what I think.”

Carol exhales a sigh with enough force to slump her shoulders and makes a mental note to talk Lucy into showing Lizzie the footage of Candace Jenner dying and reanimating, proof that zombies don’t have the brain function to be anything but mindless vectors of infection. “You remember what I told you to do when there’s danger?” she asks.

Lizzie nods. “You told me to run as fast as I can,” she says.

Carol touches the handle of her tactical knife, her fingertips a soft tap on top of the knuckle guards. “You run and run until you’re safe,” she clarifies. “If it’s your life or your sister’s life, you can’t be afraid to kill. Understand?”

“Yes,” Lizzie says. Like she means it.

Carol smiles at her behind the mask, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “You are strong, Lizzie,” she says. “You’re going to live. You and your sister, Sophia and me. We’re all going to survive. I know it.”

Famous last words.

* * *

It turns out taking a pregnancy test isn’t an exact science, because Lucy hasn’t missed a period. Hell, her cycle hasn’t been regular since she went on the pill at sixteen to mitigate her massive menstrual migraines. Which is why Lucy takes a home pregnancy test and then has Amy run a blood test to confirm the results.

 _Negative_ , she thinks and exhales a vociferous whoosh of air as she throws the home pregnancy test in the garbage. _I’m not pregnant. Thank all of the gods I don’t believe in_.

There’s a small margin of error because a blood test can only detect the human chorionic gonadotropin pregnancy hormone from the second week onward, but she can do another blood test in a week to reconfirm. Until then, odds are that her womb is empty and she’s out of the woods.

Unfortunately, the odds are never in her favor. Lucy starts coughing up blood as soon as she scrubs and dries her hands, clutching the edge of the sink as she flops onto her knees and gagging as the ichor spills down her chin.

Amy hears the horrible sounds of her choking over the radio and runs out of the infirmary with an intubation tray and a ventilator. Lucy is unconscious on the bathroom floor by the time she slams into the library, but that means she can’t fight the endotracheal tube Amy shoves down her throat. Romy barks at her while she plugs the ventilator into the outlet under the sink. “It’s okay,” Amy tells the corgi. “I’m not hurting her. I was just saving her life.”

* * *

_Friday, 28 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 502._  
_Locust Grove, GA;_  
_I-75 Southbound._

* * *

Daryl was up all night because apparently he has trouble sleeping without Lucy snoring like a freight train beside him. Or half on top of him, because she likes to cuddle up and nuzzle the sparse hair on his chest. Daryl misses her something awful, even though he’s only been gone for a handful of hours.

After he met her, he tried to fight the feelings that she had sparked in him. Daryl had made a habit of never relying on anyone for anything, but he let himself rely on her to make himself feel better and that was the beginning of the end. It was like a gateway drug, a chain reaction that changed him for better or for worse. Merle used to call him a stray dog, but he found himself a pack at the end of the world.

Maybe he would’ve been happy without her, but he doubts it. Amy would be dead and buried, her body decomposing under the hill by the quarry. Andrea would’ve lost the will to live. Jacqui would’ve died in the explosion at the C. D. C. headquarters back in Atlanta. Morgan would’ve lost Duane and he would’ve been alone in a city of the undead. Sophia would’ve died in the woods and Carol would’ve been a mother without a child. Gert and Gilda might’ve died in the forest a mile away from the farm without Glenn ever knowing what happened to them. Rick would probably still be struggling with the weight of a leadership role he never wanted heavy on his shoulders. Alec and Andre would’ve died without Michonne ever knowing that her son had made it out of the city. Eliot would’ve amputated his own arm. Milton never would’ve gotten out of Woodbury alive. Hell, the Governor might’ve survived the war and come back with a vengeance.

Lucy showed him the way to live and thrive, not just survive. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and swipes the back of his hand up over his eyes, bloodshot from not sleeping a wink. _I can’t lose her_ , he thinks. _I won’t_.

Bob sneaks a glance at Daryl before he looks back at the road. Nico drove all night, but it was slow going because they had to stop to clear the remnants of the migratory hordes that got in their way off the road. Bob volunteered to drive for a few hours, but he didn’t expect the hunter to brood in the passenger seat while he drove.

Daryl pops the glovebox open and stares at the half-empty pack of cigarettes for a long few seconds before he slams it shut again. Lucy hates it when he smokes. “Hey,” he murmurs, “you never told us about the group you were in before.”

“Which one?” Bob asks ruefully. “When you found me out on the road, I almost kept walking.”

Daryl narrows his eyes at him. “Why’s that?” he wants to know.

“’Cause I was done being the witness,” Bob answers, “two times, two different groups. I was the last one standing, like I was supposed to see it happen over and over…like it was some kind of curse. When it’s just you out there with the quiet, used to be I’d drink a bottle of anything just so I could shut my eyes at night. I figured the prison, with the people, thought it’d be easier…” he seems to stumble over the words and grips the steering wheel so hard his knuckles go white before he says, “…but the run to Big Lots, I did it for me.”

Daryl muffles a yawn in the palm of one hand and hauls a carton of water up from where he left it under the dashboard. “Gotta keep busy,” he mutters before he unscrews the lid and takes a swig.

Bob shakes his head sadly. “No,” he says, “I did it so I could get me a bottle…of anything. I picked it up, held it in my hand, and I put it down. I put it down so hard it took the whole damn shelf with it. That’s why Zach got hurt.”

Daryl squints at him, scrutinizing. There’s hopelessness in his dark eyes, the white-knuckled clench of his fists around the wheel, the stagnant hunch of his shoulders. Daryl has seen that look before, and it wasn’t a good look for Merle either. “That’s bullshit,” he says gruffly. “You didn’t mean t’ hurt nobody. Y’ain’t gonna be standin’ alone,” he grunts and puts the carton back on the floor by his feet before he adds, “not no more. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bob echoes.

* * *

_Friday, 28 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 502._  
_Fort Valley, GA;_  
_Fort Valley State University,_  
_The O’Neal Veterinary Science Building._

* * *

Fort Valley State University was a historically black university, with a student population that was ninety-one percent African-American pre-apocalypse. Hershel went to FSVU because their AVMA-accredited veterinary program had been the best in the state. Jacqui had graduated from the same university with a baccalaureate degree in public administration in 1986.

Daryl hasn’t gone anywhere near a university since that one time his brother had started dealing weed to frazzled college students and talked him into making deliveries to the stoners in the dorms because he was in his twenties and he didn’t look out of place at UGA. Merle shipped out to Panama, so the business fizzled out. Daryl hasn’t set foot on campus at any college in years, until now. Lucy would feel right at home in the wreckage of this academic institution, but he can’t help but feel out of place. It gnaws at him, a potent mix of worry for her and his own insecurities bubbling up and seething in the visceral pit of his stomach. “All right,” he mutters as they break into a research lab on the second floor of the veterinary science building, “let’s make this quick.”

Daryl, Tyreese, and Eliot find a room stocked with medical equipment while Nico, Michonne, and Bob dig through a collegiate medicine cabinet.

“Grab anything with a name that ends in -cillin or -cin,” Bob says before he spells it out, “C-I-N. We’ll dissolve the pills in the IVs, put ’em right into the bloodstream. Dosage’ll be tricky,” he mutters more to himself than either of them, “but…”

There’s a Holland Lop in one of the cages stacked on one side of the room, skinny and half-starved. Nico picks the lock and finagles the trembling thing into a kennel. There’s a bag of pellets on a desk by the cages, so she affixes a feeder to the door of the kennel and dumps some food into it. Nico pours half the contents of her canteen into a water bottle and hooks it onto the door too before she shuts the bunny in.

“That for Lucy?” Michonne asks.

Nico shrugs. “You know how much she loves rabbits,” she quips, “she’d never forgive me for not rescuing a bunny in distress.”

Michonne smiles at that because they both know how Lucy is about her rabbits. Daryl suggested they eat some of the bunnies she found at a pet store over the winter once they were fattened up and she had shrieked _Inconceivable!_ at him in homage to Vizzini from _The Princess Bride_. “Someone must’ve been feeding it,” she murmurs as she sweeps all of the bottles off a shelf full of antibiotics into her backpack, “but it looks like it’s been starving for at least a week. Whoever was keeping it alive is probably dead.”

Nico stands on a chair to check the highest shelf before she climbs down and sees Daryl peering at the rabbit in the kennel with the beginnings of a grin caught in one corner of his mouth. “How’d you do?” she asks.

“We found bags, tubes, clamps, catheters, connectors,” Tyreese says, “everything on the list.”

Daryl sets his crossbow on top of a desk while he straps a messenger bag across his body to carry the bulk of the supplies they found. “What about y’all?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Bob says. “We got it all.”

Michonne shines her flashlight on the shelves before she turns back around. “Yeah,” she echoes. “We’re good.”

“All right,” Daryl says, “let’s roll.”

It doesn’t take much time for things to start going wrong. Their exit strategy consisted of going back the same way they came in, but that exit is blocked by a horde of the walking dead. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a problem, but these zombies are _bleeding_. Worse, the blood dripping grotesquely out of their mouths is fresh and it gleams ominously under the shine of a flashlight.

“Karen said a bunch of the zombies in the pits had blood on all over their mouths,” Tyreese huffs as they run away. “Milton said it was because the rigor mortis in their hands makes them messy eaters, but maybe it was because they died from the same flu strain that’s killing our people.”

Daryl growls low in his throat. Apparently this virus isn’t satisfied with being the most infectious disease in the history of the world, so it’s mutated to spread other infections that can kill you like an overachiever gone viral.

“Up ahead!” Nico calls back over her shoulder as she takes a sharp turn into a room at the tail end of the hallway they’re running down.

Unfortunately the emergency exit has been welded shut by some well-meaning nerd with a soldering iron, so they can’t break down the door and get the hell out of dodge. There’s a wooden set of double doors chained shut, and it shakes as the zombies on the other side try to claw their way through.

“How many?” Daryl asks.

Michonne stabs one in the head and shines a light through the crack in between the doors. “I can’t tell,” she whispers back as the horde of zombies that shambled down the hallway in cold pursuit start to shuffle into the room.

“We can take ’em,” Tyreese says.

“No!” Bob shouts. “Not if they’re infected.”

“We can’t fire at ’em or bash their brains in,” Eliot says. “We didn’t come all this way to get sick.”

Tyreese side-eyes the double doors as he holds his framing hammer at the ready. “How do we know the ones in there aren’t any different?” he asks.

“We don’t,” Nico deadpans.

Daryl breaks the lock and grabs his crossbow as the chain slithers onto the floor. Nico draws her pistol and fires, blowing all the way through a ten-round clip in thirty seconds flat and reloading while Michonne walks into the horde with a slash of her katana. Bob topples every desk and chair he finds in the hallway while they run because these zombies are fresh enough to chase them.

“We don’t have an exit,” Michonne wheezes as she tries to open another door that’s been welded shut.

“Then we make one!” Daryl shouts and jumps onto the sill of the window at the dead end of the hallway.

“Get down!” Eliot shouts back at him before he throws a fire extinguisher that shatters one pane of glass.

“C’mon,” Daryl says and hauls Nico up before he offers a hand to Michonne, “jump down onto the walkway below. Let’s go!”

Tyreese helps lift Michonne onto the windowsill and makes sure Bob gets through before he climbs out himself. When he jumps, Bob slips and his bag falls over the side of the walkway.

“Bob,” Michonne yells as he clings to the strap in spite of the undead horde trying to drag him down, “let it go!”

Tyreese, Daryl, and Eliot all scramble to grab him. “Just let it go, man,” Tyreese says as the walkway shakes under the strain of their weight. “Just let it go.”

“Bob,” Eliot says, “let go of the bag, man—”

Daryl narrows his eyes as Bob yanks his bag out of the hands of the horde and it clinks on impact with the roof of the walkway. When he crouches to open the bag and finds the bottle of whiskey, he rises to his feet as a brew of rage ferments deep in his chest. _Lucy might be dead right now_ , he thinks, _our people are dyin’ and this piece of shit is squirrelin’ whiskey away_. “You ain’t got no meds in your bag? Just this?” he gnashes his teeth around the words. “You should’ve kept walkin’ that day,” he growls. “Lucy told me that we couldn’t trust you. I should’ve listened t’ her.”

Bob reaches for his gun to stop him from chucking the bottle. “Don’t,” he says in a strangled voice.

Daryl stalks his prey as the silence of the hunt settles over him and snatches the gun out of its holster. Bob’s weak, like Merle was: his addiction eclipses everything else. Daryl pins him with a glare and grabs a fistful of his shirt, hauling him to the edge of the walkway as the zombies below yowl and claw at the sky.

“Just let it go, Daryl,” Tyreese says in what he hopes is a soothing voice, “the man’s made his choice. Nothing you can do about it. Just gotta let it go.”

Daryl lets him go, but he doesn’t back off. Eliot puts a hand on his shoulder even though he has half a mind to punch Bob in the throat himself and watch the zombies tear him apart. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils in a futile attempt to unclench.

“I didn’t wanna hurt nobody,” Bob mumbles, “it was just for when it gets quiet.”

Daryl shoves the bottle of whiskey at him. “You take one sip before those meds get in our people,” he snarls as the amber liquid sloshes around, “and I will beat your ass into the _ground_. You hear me?”

Bob nods wordlessly. Daryl stomps over to where he left his crossbow and tucks the pistol under the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back.

 _Screw this_ , he thinks, _it’s time for me t’ go home_.


	7. No Spare Parts

**Like so much of the trouble in the world**  
**it ends simply with exhaustion.**

Toby Barlow, _Sharp Teeth_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 7**  
No Spare Parts

* * *

_Friday, 28 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 502._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

Before he left the fortress, Daryl had been adamant that Amy keep the only ventilator that wasn’t down in the tombs in the infirmary where it would be close enough to use on Lucy if she needed it. Alice and Hershel got stuck with manual resuscitators, and they don’t have enough bags or tubes for everyone. It gets so bad that people in A block have to pair up, the ones who aren’t feeling as bad squeezing the bags attached to the endotracheal tubes to keep the others breathing.

Henry, one of the college students that Caleb had found at Emory, starts choking a few strokes after midnight. Hershel scrambles out of bed with his last intubation tray and clambers up the stairs to find Sasha waiting in the cell, a bag valve mask in her hands. “Mr. Jacobsen’s dead in his cell,” she informs him to explain where she found a BVM, “don’t worry. I disinfected it.”

Sasha is drenched in a sheen of sweat that has suffused her hair, her brown skin has gone ashen overnight, and her eyes are red from her fever. Glenn, who shuffles out of his cell at the opposite end of A block and comes to help them with Henry, doesn’t look much better. Hershel nods grimly and goes to intubate his patient, who’s thrashing around on the floor because he can’t breathe. “Henry,” he says urgently and uses one hand to force his mouth wide open while Sasha and Glenn hold him down, “I need you to calm down. We’re trying to help.”

Henry gags and struggles against their hold, but eventually he stops fighting the intubation and sags in a heap on the floor. Sasha coughs so hard she hunches over. Glenn pours her some elderberry tea from a thermos, using the metal lid instead of a cup.

“You okay to take over?” Hershel asks as soon as she stops wheezing. Sasha nods, and he lets her grab the resuscitation bag. “Every five seconds,” he tells her, “squeeze. You start feeling lightheaded, find somebody else to take over. We’ll take it in shifts.” Then he turns back to look at his son-in-law. “You wanna help me with Mr. Jacobsen?” he asks.

Glenn nods. “Sure,” he mutters in a voice torn to shreds from coughing. “How long is that going to keep him alive?” he wants to know.

“Just as long as we’re willing to do it,” Hershel tells him soberly, “as long as it takes.”

Hershel walks back down the stairs with a lantern in one hand, the phosphorescent glow casting eerie shadows on the walls. Sasha had locked the dead man in before she went upstairs, but Henry was choking so she didn’t have time to take precautions that would keep Randolph from turning. It can take anywhere from a few seconds to several hours for a corpse to reanimate, because zombieism likes to keep you guessing.

After he opens the door of the cell, Glenn swallows thickly and draws his pocketknife. Hershel clamps one hand around his wrist and shakes his head. “No. Not here,” he whispers before he goes to grab a gurney and wheels it inside the cell, “help me get him on this.”

“Okay,” Glenn whispers back, “but in a couple of hours when Henry’s dead, how are we going to get his body down the stairs, across the cell block, and through the doors without anyone noticing?”

Hershel deflates with a sigh and a slump of his shoulders. “Well,” he says gravely, “if that happens— _if_ —you’re gonna help me.”

“What if I’m gone?” Glenn asks.

“Shut up,” Hershel snaps at him because he doesn’t want to answer such a morbid question, “and help me get him on this.”

“What are you doing?” Lizzie asks as the door to A block creaks open almost loudly enough to wake the dead.

Hershel turns to face her as Glenn frantically yanks the sheet over Randolph to cover his bloodstained face. “We’re taking Mr. Jacobsen to a quieter place,” Hershel says and puts the back of his hand on her forehead to check her fever before he hunches over to meet her eyes on her level, “go and get my copy of _Tom Sawyer_ from my cell. I want you to read it by tonight. We’ve all got jobs to do. That one’s yours.”

Glenn starts coughing again as Lizzie goes to fetch the book. Hershel wheels the gurney down the hall, into a room without a view. Glenn swallows around a clump of nausea and draws his pocketknife again. “You haven’t had to do this yet, have you?” he rasps as he watches his father-in-law flip through his three-hundred-year-old family bible to find a funeral verse.

Hershel stops at _1 Corinthians_ 15:51 and shakes his head solemnly. “There was one last night. Sasha did it,” he murmurs. “People don’t need to see it. I don’t want them to. ‘Lo!’” he reads as Glenn coughs into his fist, “‘I tell you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed…’”

* * *

Lucy wakes up and starts fighting the endotracheal tube in her throat at fuck off o’clock in the morning. After she calms down and lets Amy take it out, she gags because her mouth is bone dry and she feels like someone made her swallow a wad of steel wool. “Ugh,” she groans and licks her lips in spite of the lack of moisture in her mouth.

Amy puts a plastic cup of water on the bathroom floor next to her. Lucy chugs it, tilting her head up and back to keep the liquid from spilling down her chin. Carol is standing in the doorway with a mask obscuring her nose and mouth, her arms folded tight across her chest and a pair of latex gloves on her hands.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and squints at them. _I woke up just in time for a changing of the guard_ , she thinks as she puts her glasses back on. “Why am I on the floor?” she wants to know.

“You almost died,” Carol informs her. “You would have, if Amy hadn’t been downstairs in the infirmary.”

Lucy sucks in a shuddering breath at the memory of clawing at the edge of the sink while she choked on the caustic taste of her own blood, fear and panic twisting in her gut like spaghetti twirling around the tines of a fork. “Shit,” she mumbles.

“I got to you as soon as I heard you on the radio,” Amy tells her. “Your airway was swollen and inflamed, but it’s not anymore. I’ve never seen anyone fight off an infection so fast.”

Lucy shrugs, one-shouldered. “I’m the only person on the planet that we know of who’s survived four zombie bites,” she points out, “my immunoresponses are pretty much superhuman.”

“Wish I had that superpower,” Amy quips before she muffles a loud yawn with the back of her hand.

Lucy rolls her eyes at that. “You want the chronic pain and crippling joint problems that come with it?” she asks.

“Nope,” Amy says and shakes her head so locks of her lank blonde hair oscillate around her shoulders.

Lucy snorts. “I didn’t think so,” she murmurs before she adjusts her glasses and looks at Carol, “it wasn’t a coincidence that Amy kept a ventilator on hand in the infirmary, was it?” she deduces.

“No,” Carol says, “it wasn’t.”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “Whose idea was it?” she asks. “Who gave the order to prioritize my life above the lives of people in need of immediate medical attention?”

“Daryl made the call,” Carol says without any hint of remorse, “with unanimous support from the council. You’re the reason we’ve been able to survive this long without things falling apart. You know what’s at stake here.”

Amy nods, a sharp descent of her chin. “We need you alive,” she snaps and grabs the ventilator before she turns on her heels and walks out. “You should think about that next time before you risk your life.”

Carol exhales a sigh muffled by her mask and steps out of the doorway while Amy makes her melodramatic exit. “Andrea’s down in the tombs,” she says as soon as the exhausted surgeon is out of earshot, “she might not make it.”

Lucy bites her lip as she shuffles out of the bathroom and flops on top of the bed instead of bothering to unpeel the covers. “I had already been exposed and no one else was showing any signs of infection,” she mumbles. “I thought doing those autopsies was less of a risk for me than it would’ve been for anyone else. I’m not going to apologize for doing what I had to do to protect the only family I’ve got left in this world.”

Carol smiles at her behind the mask. Lucy is ruthless under the right circumstances, but at her core she’s also the kind of person who puts herself at risk to protect the people she cares about. If she were any other way, she never would’ve run into the dark forest to find Sophia. “You were trying to fix what needed fixing,” she says. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

* * *

Rick checks the snares at sunrise before he goes to check on the kids in isolation. “Carl?” he calls out in a low whisper that echoes halfheartedly in the silent hall.

“You okay?” Carl whispers back as his father comes around the corner to stand in the crossway where the halls intersect.

“I was going to ask you that,” Rick says.

“We’re fine,” Carl says as he walks down the hall to meet his father at the crossway.

Rick sighs in a futile attempt to uproot some of the tension that has grown into his neck and shoulders. “No one’s sick?” he asks. “You didn’t have to do anything?”

Carl has to fight the urge to roll his eyes. “I haven’t had to use my gun, Dad.”

Rick grits his teeth because his son is a killer now and he would do anything to change that, but sometimes it feels like he’s talking to a brick wall. Carl doesn’t seem to regret what he did or think it was wrong to take a human life, because the person he killed was a threat and that had made shooting her an okay thing to do in his mind. Rick appreciates everything Lucy has done for their people, but he doesn’t want his little boy to end up like her: ruthless and capable of killing without remorse. Worse, he can’t bring himself to regret the killing he’s done since this all started. Not even Shane. “What about Judith?” he asks.

“She’s okay,” Carl says.

“Good,” Rick says.

“Can we come out soon?” Carl wants to know.

Rick shakes his head slowly. “Not just yet,” he says.

“Dad, I was around you when you were in the middle of it,” Carl points out in a voice just this side of petulant, “and I was around Patrick. I didn’t get it. I can help you.”

“Thanks,” Rick mutters, “but I need you to stay here.”

“I will,” Carl says in a hush, “but, Dad, you can’t keep me from it.”

Rick narrows his eyes at him. “From what?” he asks.

“From what always happens,” Carl says. Death. Plague. Pestilence. Pain. Suffering. Or, just another day in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Rick sighs. “Yeah,” he says before he turns and walks back down the hall, “but I think it’s my job to try.”

* * *

Noris dies later that morning, following his nineteen-year-old son Corey into the dark. Glenn is upstairs resuscitating Henry and Sasha is too sick to help him with the body, so Hershel gets him on the gurney and wheels his corpse out of the cell block with grave efficiency before he stabs him in the head.

“Hershel,” Rick says on the other side of the door in between A block and B block as the older man shakes with the disquiet of his unshed tears.

“Third one we’ve lost,” Hershel says in a voice that hangs like decay in the stale air. “We’re burning them behind the block,” he adds helplessly, “ _burning them_. That’s what it’s come to.”

“Are you okay?” Rick asks. Nothing is okay right now, but Hershel has been so busy taking care of everyone and he needs someone to check in with him.

Hershel turns and looks over his shoulder at the body underneath the bloodstained white sheet before he turns back to Rick, a sheen of sweat beading on his forehead. “I talked to him yesterday about Steinbeck,” he says, “he told me a quote: ‘a sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.’ That’s exactly why I didn’t want them all of see what happens. I know they know, but I didn’t want them to see it right now.”

“They’re seeing you, Hershel,” Rick tells him. “They see you keep going, even after all the choices keep getting taken away.”

Hershel sighs. “I still believe there’s a plan,” he murmurs. “I still believe there’s a reason.”

“You think it’s all a test?” Rick ask.

Hershel shrugs. “Life was always a test, Rick,” he says. “That hasn’t changed just because the world has.”


	8. Shattered

**Home is not where you are from,**  
**it is where you belong.**  
**Some of us travel the whole world to find it.**  
**Others, find it in a person.**

Beau Taplin, “Buried Light”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 8**  
Shattered

* * *

_Friday, 28 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 502._  
_Macon, GA;_  
_I-75 Northbound._

* * *

Tyreese volunteers to drive on their way back to the fortress. Daryl sits in silence and fiddles with the fletching on his arrows until he notices the other man sneaking quick glances at him out of the corner of his eye. “What’s up, Ty?” he asks.

“You…” Tyreese clears his throat awkwardly. “You and Karen used to date, right?”

Daryl nods brusquely. “Yeah,” he says, “but it was like sixteen years ago.”

Tyreese anxiously flexes his hands around the steering wheel and fixes his eyes on the road. “How long did she make you wait to have sex?” he asks in a voice that reeks of embarrassment.

Daryl snorts. “Not long,” he answers. “I ate her out in the alley behind the tattoo shop where she worked an hour after I met her.”

“Oh,” Tyreese says. Obviously that wasn’t the response he was looking for.

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Look,” he mutters, “we were young and stupid. I was twenty-six. Karen was twenty-three, she was six weeks pregnant by some douchebag, and she needed t’ blow off a little steam. It didn’t mean nothin’. Maybe she thinks part of the reason why things didn’t work out with us was ’cause we did it right off the bat, and she wants things t’ work out with you.”

Tyreese flicks his gaze to the hunter and frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing. “You think so?” he asks.

Daryl nods again. “Yeah,” he says. “You guys are good together. You’re better for her and Noah ’n I ever was.”

Tyreese smiles and turns his frown upside-down. “Thanks,” he says.

Daryl hums low in his throat, a soft _mm-hmm_. “No problem,” he says gruffly as they drive past a sign and take the exit for Highway 34.

 _Wait for me_ , he thinks. _I’m almost home_.

* * *

_Friday, 28 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 502._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

There are two more casualties, a woman from Woodbury named Cait and her twelve-year-old daughter Eryn, before Sasha almost dies of dehydration. Hershel resuscitates her while Cait turns in the cell next door and Henry suffocates in spite of the endotracheal tube in his throat, silent as the grave.

“Welcome back,” he says.

Sasha blinks at him with bleary eyes. “I passed out?” she asks.

Hershel nods. “You were dehydrated,” he explains and holds up the IV bag of fluids connected to the catheter he put in one of the veins in her arm, “being a hero takes a lot out of you.”

Sasha closes her eyes for a fraction of a second and smiles at him. “You should know,” she murmurs, “I thought you were an idiot to come in here. I was sure you were just gonna be a foolish dead man.”

“I can’t tell if that’s a compliment,” Hershel says and smiles back at her.

Sasha blinks again to clear some of the haze from her fever out of her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she rasps. “I must’ve hit my head. I don’t believe in magic or luck,” she rambles. “I do the math and I don’t gamble, but I don’t know if I’d be here right now if you weren’t so damn stupid.”

“You know what?” Hershel says and smiles wider. “I’m gonna take that as a compliment.”

Glenn notices that Henry isn’t breathing and tries to call out for Hershel while he performs CPR, but his voice gets stuck in his throat and he starts choking on his own blood as the zombie on the bed rises and shambles out of the cell.

“Hershel!” Lizzie yells as the zombie yowls around the tube in its throat. “Hershel!”

Cait shuffles out of her cell and claws at Hershel until Cath staggers to her feet and stabs her in the back of the head through the bars of her cell. “Everyone stay in your cells!” Hershel shouts as the zombified twelve-year-old girl yowls from inside her cell. It’s impossible to look at Eryn without seeing his little girls, Rachel and Susie. Hershel swallows hard and clambers up the stairs as Kate takes aim from the cell across the block with her P99 and shoots Eryn in the head.

“Just follow me, Henry,” Lizzie coos at the zombie to coax him down the hall, “down here, away from Glenn. Come on,” she beckons with one hand and walks backward with a tattered copy of _Tom Sawyer_ open in the other. “Come on, Henry. This way. Come on, Henry. Just a little more. Keep coming. Come on,” she glances at the empty prison cells as she steps back, “down here, Henry. Keep following me. Come on, a little further—”

Parker reaches out through the bars of her cell to stab the zombie in the back of the neck, careful not to damage the resuscitator in his mouth with her machete. Hershel crouches to remove the BVM and Lizzie screams at the sight of Henry dead, his blood trickling onto the floor. Parker collapses with one hand on the wall, the stand holding up the IV bag attached to the catheter in her forearm skittering over the stone.

“You okay?” Hershel asks.

Parker nods slowly and wipes at the beads of sweat on her forehead with the back of her hand before she taps her earpiece. “Alec,” she rasps in spite of how sore her throat is from coughing nonstop, “don’t you dare break quarantine. We’re okay, but I won’t be okay if you get the flu too.”

“I thought he was nice,” Lizzie whimpers, “he didn’t scratch Glenn. I thought maybe he listens.”

Maggie, who came running at the sound of the shot fired in the gloom, unlocks the door to A block with a clank and clambers up the stairs. “Dad,” she wheezes. “Where’s Glenn?”

“He’s in his cell,” Lizzie sniffles as Hershel disinfects the resuscitator with an alcohol swab and wipes it clean with a scrap of gauze.

Maggie runs to the cell in the back corner of the block and drops to her knees to check his pulse. “He’s turning blue!” she wails. “Daddy—”

“Clear his airway,” Hershel shouts from somewhere down the hall as Glenn starts to shake and cough out wads of spit and blood, “roll him on his back.”

Maggie pins him with his shoulders on the floor and holds his arms at his sides to stop him from fighting the intubation. “You’re gonna be okay,” she murmurs. “We’re gonna be okay.”

“Come on, son,” Hershel says as Glenn splutters and gags around the tube before it hits the back of his throat. “Come on, you know how this works. Just relax. Stay with us,” he whispers urgently as Maggie sucks in a sharp breath and chokes back a flood of tears. “Stay with us.”

Maggie cups his bloodstained face in one hand and hunches over him to kiss the corner of his mouth. “You’re gonna be okay,” she murmurs in echo. “We’re gonna be okay.”

“I didn’t want you in here,” Hershel says, but something in his voice betrays how proud he is of her for not respecting his wishes.

Maggie looks up and meets his tired eyes, her gaze unflinching. “I know,” she tells him softly. “I had to. Just like you.”

* * *

It’s late in the afternoon by the time Tyreese drives back through the front gate of the fortress and parks in the courtyard outside of the complex. “Sasha?” he asks as soon as Rick is within earshot. “Karen?”

“I don’t know,” Rick says. “I’m sorry, Ty.”

Daryl slings his crossbow back over his shoulder and grabs the duffle bag of meds that Bob held onto for Tyreese while he was driving. “Okay,” he says, “get in there. We got this.”

Hershel walks out into the courtyard to get some air while Maggie stays with her husband. Bob goes to help administer the meds to the people down in the tombs before he drops the rest of the antibiotics and antivirals off in A block. Caleb is well enough to take it from there.

Daryl squints at him, scrutinizing. “How’s everybody doin’?” he asks.

“We’ve lost six people since yesterday,” Hershel tells him solemnly. “We almost lost Glenn, but Maggie and I got to him in time. He’s breathing on his own now.”

Daryl swallows hard. “He’s a tough sumbitch,” he says gruffly.

Hershel nods. “He sure is,” he says.

Daryl smiles, crookedly. “You’re a tough sumbitch,” he points out.

“I am,” Hershel says and smiles back at him.

Famous last words.

* * *

Carol is the one who takes Daryl aside to tell him what happened to his wife before he breaks quarantine and busts into the library. “We almost lost her,” she murmurs. “We would’ve, if Amy hadn’t gotten to her in time.”

“I took her throat culture this morning and it was negative for a pneumococcal infection,” Amy interjects, “she’s out of the woods now.”

Daryl nods brusquely and tries to stay calm even though his heart is beating so hard it feels like his chest is going to crack open. “You’re gonna need t’ take new ones from us,” he says, “we ran into some zombies that might’ve been infected with the same flu strain we got goin’ around. Maybe our vector in the pits migrated here from the campus or somethin’.”

Amy drags him to the infirmary and makes him suffer through a throat culture before he takes the stairs to the library two at a time. Lucy is sitting in their bed with her nose in a book, her glasses folded on top of the bedside shelf because she’s nearsighted and she’s not supposed to read with them on. Daryl stands in the doorway and lets the sight of her sink in because he desperately needs to see that his girl is out of the woods and miraculously _alive_.

Lucy glances up from her book and squints at him in a way that scrunches up her whole face before she puts her glasses back on and smiles at him in the shy way she has that makes his heart stutter deep in his chest. “Hi,” she rasps.

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and throws himself at her, his arms closing around her like the jaws of a steel trap to crush her against the lean muscular wall of his chest. Lucy wraps her arms tight around his waist and splays her hands over the wings on his vest as she hugs him back. Daryl buries his face in her hair and inhales deeply through his nose to breathe in the scent of her sweat, the black cherry fragrance of her shampoo obscured by a layer of grease in the soft frizz. It doesn’t change how good she smells to him: musky and sweet, like the pure air in the darkest part of a forest. When he kisses the crown of her head, Lucy starts ugly crying and clings to him while she muffles her sobs in the crook of his neck. It’s been two days since he left without saying goodbye and twelve of their people died in the epidemic despite her best efforts. When she almost died, her last coherent thought had been of him coming home to find her corpse on their bathroom floor and she had been so terrified of never seeing him again that she panicked and blacked out. Daryl starts bawling too because he hasn’t slept in almost forty-eight hours, sixteen of their own died while he was gone, he almost lost the love of his life, and that debacle with Bob made him miss his brother like a hole in his head.

After they both stop crying, Lucy exhales a soft rueful gust of laughter and smiles at him. “I missed you,” she mumbles.

Daryl smiles back and tilts her head up so he can kiss her, cupping her plump face in his rough palm and tasting strawberry lemonade on her lips instead of blood. “Yeah,” he says gruffly. “I missed you, too.”


	9. Crushed Pearl

**The technicians watch the screen,**  
**looking for something: a block, a leak,**  
**a melodrama, a future**  
**sudden death, clenching**  
**of this fist which goes on**  
**shaking itself at fate.**  
**They say: it may be genetic.**

 **There you have it, from science,**  
**what God has been whispering all along**  
**through stones, madmen and birds’ entrails:**  
**hardness of the heart can kill you.**

Margaret Atwood, “Heart Test with an Echo Chamber”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 9**  
Crushed Pearl

* * *

_Friday, 28 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 502._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

Daryl ends up dragging a chair into the bathroom for Lucy and washing her hair in the sink, because they don’t have a shower or a bathtub in their makeshift cozy apartment behind the circulation desk in the library and breaking quarantine isn’t an option.

“I thought I might be pregnant,” Lucy informs him as the conditioner he rinsed out of her hair swirls down the drain.

Daryl stares down at her with his blue eyes wide and a gobsmacked expression on his face. _Shit_ , he thinks. “How?” he asks incredulously. “You’re on the pill.”

Lucy shrugs, one-shouldered. “No form of birth control is a hundred perfect effective,” she mumbles, “birth control pills in particular have a nine percent failure rate. Nobody else was throwing up. I thought it might be symptomatic of morning sickness, not the flu.”

Daryl swallows hard. Lucy’s his wife, but they’ve never talked about children. It was a conversation they should’ve had before they got married, but they’re living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and survival took priority. “Okay,” he says, treading carefully, “but y’ain’t pregnant?”

Lucy shakes her head slowly, her soft wet hair slithering in tendrils over her shoulders. “I took a urine test and a blood test,” she clarifies, “both came back negative. There’s a small margin of error, so I’m going to take another blood test in a week or two.”

Daryl narrows his eyes at her as she twists her hair up into a bun to keep it from getting her camisole wet. “What if the tests’re wrong?” he asks.

“I talked to Alice this morning about my options,” Lucy says, “if the blood test comes back negative I’m going to get an IUD to prevent any unplanned pregnancies in the future, and if the blood test comes back positive I’m going to have an abortion.”

Daryl flinches, his shoulders going taut as a bowstring. “You’d kill our baby?” he growls. “I don’t even get a say?”

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek to stop herself from snapping at him. “No,” she tells him softly, “I wouldn’t kill our baby. I’d have a fetus removed from _my_ body. There’s a reason we didn’t force people to donate their organs, or blood, or tissue pre-apocalypse. It was because we have bodily autonomy, the right to choose who or what can use our bodies for what and for how long. You can’t kill something that wouldn’t be viable outside the womb, but let’s say for the sake of argument that a fetus is alive from the moment of conception. It still doesn’t have the right to use my body without my consent. No one does,” she bites her lip and looks down at the slubs of scar tissue on her arms shaped like teeth, “even if using my body would save their life. It has to be my choice, and I’ve chosen not to have a baby.”

Daryl frowns, his eyebrows furrowing under the strands of unkempt hair falling over his face. It bothers him that she made her choice without him, but no way in hell would he ever force her to have a baby that she didn’t want. “So,” he mutters as dread creeps in and hollows out a pit in his stomach, “you’re sayin’ you don’t want kids, ever?”

“No,” Lucy says in a soft voice that makes his heart clench horribly in his chest, “I’m saying I don’t want kids right now. We’ve only been married for a month. I want it to be just us for a few years. I’d want that even if I wasn’t the leader of a survivalist group living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and trying to cure the most infectious disease in the history of the world.”

Daryl exhales a loud sigh that hunches his shoulders as the dread that had taken root in his gut withers and warmth flourishes deep in his chest instead. “I do like havin’ my wife all t’ myself,” he drawls.

Lucy adjusts her glasses with one hand and muffles a yawn in the palm of the other. “So,” she says and ekes the _oh_ sound out into a sharp _ooh_ , “you’re seriously pro-life?”

Daryl swallows hard and shrugs because he was never much for politics, before—and this issue wasn’t personal for him, not like it was for her. “I dunno,” he confesses. “I never really thought much about it ’til now. What you said about bodily autonomy made sense and I’d never make you do nothin’ you don’t wanna do, but if you were pregnant…”

“…you’d want to keep it,” Lucy deduces.

Daryl nods brusquely. “Yeah,” he says.

“Okay.” Lucy rises to her feet and hobbles out of the bathroom to put a pair of fuzzy socks on her feet and drink some water out of a plastic cup on their bedside table. “No unprotected sex, then.”

Daryl squints at her, his forehead crumpling with confusion. “What?” he asks.

“No unprotected sex until a day after the surgery if I get a copper IUD,” Lucy says. “No unprotected sex until a week after the surgery if I get a hormonal IUD. Our carnal shenanigans won’t come with a nine percent chance of pregnancy if we do that, pun intended.”

Daryl snorts and sits on their bed next to her. “What’s the difference between ’em?” he wants to know.

“Apparently a copper IUD creates a hostile environment for sperm by causing an inflammatory reaction inside the uterus,” Lucy informs him in the phlegmatic voice she uses to stop herself from infodumping at the speed of light, “and a hormonal IUD releases a low dose of progestin into your body every day to thicken the cervical mucus and keep sperm from entering the womb. There are side effects for both types, but given my history with inflammation…” she holds up her right hand to showcase the scars from her arthrodesis surgery, “…I’d prefer a hormonal IUD.”

“What about the surgery?” Daryl asks.

“It’s not invasive,” Lucy says matter-of-factly. “It takes five minutes to insert the device. Alice won’t need to anesthetize me during the procedure or anything.”

Daryl squints at her over his shoulder and makes a guttural noise in the back of his throat, a grunt that sounds like _huh_. “So that means we gotta use condoms for a while,” he deduces.

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound.

Daryl stands up with another grunt and their mattress huffs a faint squeak in protest. “I’ll be right back,” he says before he goes to get a box of condoms from inventory and stashes the rubbers in his desk. “There,” he murmurs. “Now we’re safe.”

Lucy slumps back against the pillows and smiles at him shyly. _Nowhere is safe_ , she thinks, _but I always feel safe with you_. “I love you,” she says out loud.

Daryl shucks his vest before he starts unbuttoning his shirt and strips down to his sleeveless undershirt and jeans. Lucy is still contagious, but he’s not going to spend another night without her. Daryl crawls into bed with her and she lets him nod off with his head on her chest, his sinewy arms hooked tight around her waist. “Yeah,” he mutters drowsily. “I love you, too.”

* * *

_Saturday, 29 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 503._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

When the morning comes, Glenn blinks to clear the cobwebs out of his eyes and smiles at the sight of Maggie hovering above him. “We could use a vacation,” he rasps. “Get away. Just for a weekend.”

Maggie squeezes his hand and grins down at him, wide and warm. “You ever been to Amicalola Falls?” she asks. “Tallest waterfall in Georgia. Daddy took me there when I was little. When we were up there, all the way at the top looking down…” she tilts her head sideways and her green eyes look right through him as she sinks into the deep water of a treasured memory, “…I felt like I was flying.”

Glenn squeezes back and smiles at her. “I’ll go load up the station wagon,” he quips. Still, all joking aside, they _could_ take a trip to Amicalola Falls—they’d have to wait until winter has come and gone and he’d have to invite Gilda and Amy and Gert and Milton for safety in numbers and bring a mini-cooler full of Lucy’s blood in case anyone gets bitten or scratched, but it’s not impossible. Maybe he could plan something for their anniversary.

Maggie exhales a soft wheeze of laughter and hunches over to kiss his neck in spite of the sheen of cold sweat on his skin. “I’m gonna get you some water,” she says.

“I can get it,” Glenn says.

Maggie lets go of his hand and stops him as he tries to sit up. “I know,” she murmurs, “but I’m doing it.”

Glenn swallows thickly, his throat raw and dry from coughing and being intubated. “Okay,” he rasps.

Maggie lets her palm linger on his chest before she rises to her feet. “I’ll be right back,” she says.

 _We’re gonna be okay_ , she thinks, _the worst is over_.

Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come.

* * *

Bob spends the night in A block, but he doesn’t sleep a wink; instead he watches over the patients while Hershel gets some rest because keeping himself busy is better than crawling into a bottle to dull the deafening roar of the quiet.

Sasha breaks the silence by stepping out of A block and into the guard station and calling his name. “Bob,” she rasps and startles him so abruptly that he loses grip on his self-loathing for a fraction of a second.

Bob shrugs in a futile attempt to shake off some of the bone-deep tension in his shoulders. “You should be resting,” he tells her softly.

“After the night you had,” Sasha murmurs, “so should you.”

Bob nods and clutches reflexively at the tattered box in his hands, all that remains of who he was before the world ended. “I’m going to,” he says. “I’m on my way to find an open cell in C block until D gets cleaned up.”

“I just wanted to say thank you,” Sasha says. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Hershel, and you.”

Bob shakes his head slowly. “Hershel,” he mutters, “not me.”

“You helped save my life,” Sasha insists.

Bob squirms like he wants to shed his skin because something in her eyes shines that has nothing to do with her fever, and it makes him feel all twisted up inside. Sasha is a hero who risked her to make sure the other sick people in A block didn’t choke to death on their own blood and ended up with one foot in the grave, while he was clinging to a bottle of whiskey like it was a lifeline. Bob knows he isn’t worthy of the look in her eyes, like she sees something heroic in him that isn’t there. “Stop,” he bites out.

“Bob,” Sasha rasps.

Bob shakes his head again before he turns and starts to walk away from her. “Stop,” he says.

“You put those meds in my IV bag,” Sasha says in a clarion voice that trembles with something vital that he doesn’t want to hear, “and now in a couple minutes I’m gonna feel the sun on my skin. So you are gonna let me thank you.”

Bob swallows hard as she slumps in the doorway to the hallway that connects A block to the main complex. “Sasha,” he says, “you’re not strong enough yet.”

“So help me,” Sasha tells him.

* * *

Nico breaks quarantine to bring the Holland Lop that she found at Fort Valley State to see Lucy, who lets him cuddle on her lap and feeds him dried bananas. Anton painstakingly grew them from bulbs Lucy had planted in one of the storage units with a space heater to keep them warm during the winter and transplanted them in one of the greenhouses. When the fruit was finally ripe, they harvested it and dehydrated some of the bananas to snack on because they couldn’t eat them all fresh.

Daryl stares down at the small animal his wife is fawning over and shakes his head. “I took her on a picnic once,” he mutters, “and a rabbit came outta the woods to sit with her. I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it.”

Nico gently boops the Lop and watches his floppy ear droop adorably. “Lucy’s always been the bunny whisperer,” she tells him, “but Cath’s the Disney princess.”

Lucy picks the rabbit up with one hand on the scruff of his neck, the other underneath his fluffy rump. “Hershel needs to trim his claws,” she murmurs as she inspects the overgrown floof on his feet, “or he’s going to shred the wood in the hutch to blunt them himself.”

Nico shrugs as the librarian puts the rabbit back in her lap and lets him nibble on her fingertip instead of more dried bananas. “I’ll take him to the vet later.”

“Lucy?” Tyreese calls out as the door to the library shuts behind him with a click of the tubular latch. “Daryl? You in here?”

Daryl goes to open the door to the offices he and Lucy converted into their apartment as Tyreese approaches the circulation desk. “Hey,” he says gruffly. “What’s goin’ on, Ty?”

“I found something down in the tombs,” Tyreese tells him. “You need to see this. Come on.”

Daryl puts one hand at the small of her back as Lucy hobbles down the stairs into the ouroboros of underground cells, split down the middle by death row and the execution chamber. It’s a circular hallway illuminated by industrial grid fixtures of fluorescent lights that hang from the ceiling, the white enamel cracked and peeling to reveal the embossed steel underneath. Lucy swallows thickly as the smell of disinfectant invades her nostrils before she inhales the subtle reek of decay.

“Look,” Tyreese says and points down at a piece of waferboard with the corpse of a rabbit dissected and pinned to the wood.

Daryl adjusts his grip on the strap of his crossbow and crouches down to get a closer look at the vivisection as Lucy recoils from the smell of rotten meat. “What the hell?” he mutters.

“I was disinfecting the hallway and I found this,” Tyreese says. “I think we’ve got a psychopath living with us.”


	10. All the Way Down

**Death comes to me again, a girl**  
**in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.**  
**It’s not so terrible, she tells me,**  
**not like you think, all darkness**  
**and silence. There are windchimes**  
**and the smell of lemons, some days**  
**it rains, but more often the air is dry**  
**and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase**  
**built from hair and bone and listen.**  
**to the voices of the living. I like it,**  
**she says, shaking the dust from her hair,**  
**especially when they fight, and when they sing.**

Dorianne Laux, “Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. X**  
_Here We Remain_  
**Chapter 10**  
All the Way Down

* * *

_Sunday, 30 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 504._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

Hershel succumbs to the flu and dies in his cell later that night. Andrea finds his zombified corpse yowling and clawing at a dead mouse through the bars in the morning and stabs him in the head so his daughters won’t see their father that way. Michonne helps her shroud him in his sheets and carry him down the stairs out of C block, where Maggie and Beth won’t be able to see the virulent red and black of his blood staining the white sheets.

There’s a haze of mourning that permeates the fortress once the news spreads more quickly than any plague. Lucy opens her eyes at the sound of Daryl sniffling and instinctually she knows that something has gone horribly wrong. “Who died?” she rasps as she puts her glasses back on.

Daryl swallows thickly and wipes his nose haphazardly with the heel of his hand. “Hershel,” he says through his tears.

“Shit,” Lucy mumbles as Daryl abruptly rises from the chair by his desk and comes to sit on the edge of their bed. When he scoops his sinewy arms around her waist to hold her flush against the wall of his chest, she lets him bury his face in the crook of her neck and threads the fingers of one hand through his unkempt hair. Lucy feels too numb to process her grief, but feeling his tears fall hot on her skin and shivering at the scrape of his beard against the sensitive hollow of her throat while he cries on her shoulder makes her heart constrict like a fist is clenched around it. “I’m sorry,” she tells him softly. “I know he was your friend.”

Daryl tangles one hand in the hair at the nape of her neck where her braid is loose and digs the fingers of the other into the flesh of her waist to hold her even closer. “I’m so damn tired of losin’ people,” he growls.

Lucy sighs as his shoulders tremble with tension and sobs. “I know,” she says, “me too.”

Daryl exhales with a shudder and lifts his head to look at her. “If you’re thinkin’ of blamin’ yourself for this,” he says gruffly, “don’t.”

Lucy blushes, her pale cheeks flushed bright and blotchy pink. “You know me too well,” she mutters, her voice somber and petulant.

Daryl narrows his eyes and holds her gaze while he strokes the rough pad of his thumb in a slow curl over the back of her neck. “There ain’t nothin’ you could’ve done,” he says, “you were too sick t’ help him down in A block ’til yesterday. If you hadn’t stayed in bed then, you’d feel a hell of a lot worse now.”

 _When I was immunocompromised_ , Lucy thinks, _I got sick at the drop of a hat. I’d push myself as soon as I felt anywhere from sixty to eighty percent better, and I always felt like shit the next day. I’m in remission, but_ … she bites her lip and gnaws on the flesh in between her teeth, … _old habits die hard_. “I know,” she says out loud. “I just hate that I couldn’t’ve done anything to save him, or any of the people who died.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Yeah,” he murmurs, “me too.”

* * *

Beth gives the eulogy with bloodshot eyes, swollen and rimmed in red from a flood of tears shed in a deluge of sobs before the funeral on the bank of the creek by the cluster of sugar maple trees outside the concrete walls, but inside the barricade of shipping containers. “After the farm we were always moving,” she says in a voice that shakes with the dregs of crying her eyes out, “but then something good happened. Finally.”

Maggie sucks in a sharp breath and clings to Glenn as her mouth trembles, her grip on his hand a clutch hard enough to make his fingers go numb until she unclenches her bloodless white knuckles. Gert stands with her arms folded tight across her chest as Milton puts a tentative hand on the small of her back, his fingers splayed faintly over the lumbar arch of her spine.

Beth swallows hard. “We found this place. Daddy knew we could make it into a home,” she cracks a smile at that and glances at the climate-controlled ridge and furrow greenhouses made of glass and metal they built outside the fence, “he said we could grow crops in the fields, find pigs and chickens, stop running, stop scavenging. We just needed a safe place to be.”

Gilda stays with her twin, one hand on his shoulder. Andrea holds Amy while she cries on her shoulder, muffling the sound of her sniffling. Michonne has three-year-old Andre on her right hip, her katana in its saya on the other side. Anton has an arm around Caleb, whose eyes are still bright from his stubborn fever.

Beth glances at Zach in his wheelchair, the chair Nico found and customized for him. “I kept my bag packed for months,” she admits. “I was afraid to get my hopes up by thinking we could actually stay here, but then Daddy told me something. ‘If you don’t hold onto hope, what’s the point of living?’ so I unpacked my bag and I found my journal—the journal I forgot about—and I wrote this down because you should write down wishes to make ’em come true. We can live here,” she says. “We can live here for the rest of our lives, and Daddy did.”

Maggie reads a passage from the bible instead of giving another eulogy as Glenn carves an epitaph into the weathered trunk of their memorial tree. “‘For I am already on the point of being sacrificed,’” she says, “‘the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will render to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing. Amen.’”

Lucy calls for a vote in the aftermath of the funeral to fill the empty council seat. Glenn nominates Maggie, who accepts on the condition that she gets to put Rick in charge of agriculture instead of overseeing the crops herself. When the votes are tallied, it’s unanimous.

Unfortunately, life in the post-apocalyptic wasteland doesn’t stop for anyone.

* * *

_Monday, 31 October 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 505._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

Lucy calls a meeting of the council on Halloween to discuss the dissected rabbit Tyreese found down in the tombs. There are green, orange, and purple twinkle lights festooned all over the library and fake cobwebs with plastic bats and spiders in every hue of the rainbow strewn in the corners of the bookshelves. Lucy is holding a tiny ghost pumpkin in her hands, stimming with the gourd in her papasan chair behind the circulation desk while the others sit at the wooden study tables that had replaced the metal ones they used to fortify their stockade during the weeklong war.

“We need to talk about Lizzie,” she deadpans.

Carol frowns, the space between her eyebrows furrowing. “What about her?” she wants to know.

“I think she vivisected one of the bunnies,” Lucy informs her, “she borrowed a book on rabbit dissection from me. I thought maybe Hershel needed it for something until Tyreese found a dead rabbit cut open and pinned to a piece of wood in the tombs. Lizzie made an incision to sever its vocal folds and it didn’t have the precision that someone with medical training would have, but it was precise enough. When she cut it open, it was still alive. I think she’s trying to figure out where the line is between life and death, to understand the zombies. If she escalates, someone is going to get hurt.”

Carol stares at her, eyes gone wide in horror. “You think she’s going to start cutting people up?” she asks incredulously.

Lucy shrugs, one-shouldered. “I cut up dead things every day to see if the zombie virus is mutating,” she points out. “You told me that Lizzie doesn’t understand the difference between a zombie and a person.”

Carol shakes her head slowly. “Lizzie’s just confused about them,” she clarifies for everyone else in the room. “She doesn’t understand the difference between us being alive and them being undead. She doesn’t see what they are. She thinks they’re still people.”

“Mika the same way?” Daryl asks.

 _Do you understand what they are now?_ Carol had asked Lizzie after she took her and her sister outside the walls, outside the barricade.

Lizzie had nodded. _I know_ , she had said, _I know what I have to do now. I know_.

 _I know it’s ugly_ , Carol had told her, _and it’s scary and it does change you. That’s how we get to be here_ , she turned and looked at Sophia with her purple and black pistol in her hands. _That’s growing up now_.

Mika had shaken her head so fast her blonde hair wavered over her shoulders. _I don’t want to hurt anyone_ , she had mumbled. _I don’t want to be mean_.

 _You have to be sometimes_ , Lizzie had said, _but just sometimes_.

“No,” Carol murmurs, “Mika doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.”

* * *

“Lizzie,” Mika whispers as her sister leads her up the stairs to the rooftop garden of flowers and herbs. “When we were giving the zombies names we were just pretending things weren’t bad, but things were bad. Those things are bad,” she snaps and Lizzie tightens her grip around her wrist, “they _are_. We can’t pretend anymore.”

“I’m not pretending,” Lizzie retorts, “you were. I know what they are. I can hear them.”

“Lizzie…” Mika tries to yank her hand away from her sister as they grind to a halt behind a bed of dahlias, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, snapdragons, and gerbera daisies, “…they want to kill you.”

“No,” Lizzie says wistfully, “they just want me to change. We can be like them. I want us to change.”

“Stop it,” Mika whimpers as her sister unsheathes the knife that Carol gave her.

“I saw Andrea kill Hershel,” Lizzie says, “he didn’t have to die. I can make you understand…” she drags her sister by the wrist and listens to her bloodcurdling scream die as she slits her throat, “…I can make them all understand.”

Sophia finds Lizzie in the garden and even though she hasn’t spoken more than a handful of a words in months, she screams for Carol before the girl with blood on her small hands draws a gun from behind her back and shrieks at her to stop.

It’s too late. Carol runs up the stairs and slams the door wide open to find her daughter being held at gunpoint and Mika, bled out from a nick of her carotid artery. It’s an artery that Carol herself had told Lizzie about, the best place to cut if you want to give someone a quick and painless death.

Lizzie grins wide, showing her teeth. “Don’t worry,” she says, “Mika will come back. I didn’t hurt her brain.”

Carol flicks her gaze to her daughter and something in her eyes goes flat and stone cold. “Lizzie,” she says in a deceptively calm voice that doesn’t betray how terrified she is, “put the gun down.”

Lucy stops halfway up the stairs to silently order the rest of the council to stay put so they don’t spook Lizzie by crowding her. Daryl crouches to nock a bolt and draw his bowstring as she hobbles up the stairs into the light.

“We have to wait,” Lizzie wails. “I need to show you. You’ll see,” she glances at Lucy as she emerges from the shadows in the doorway to the rooftop and trembles with her finger on the trigger of the revolver in her hands. “You’ll all finally get it. We have to wait. I just want us to wait.”

Carol narrows her eyes at the muzzle of the revolver and takes one step closer to her daughter. “Okay,” she says in the same desperately calm voice. “We can wait. You just give me the gun. We can wait, I swear.”

“Lizzie,” Lucy murmurs as she hobbles to put herself in between Sophia and the gun with Daryl watching her from the shadows and hopes like hell that he won’t have to shoot a child, “you killed your sister. What the hell do you think you’re waiting for?”

“I didn’t kill her!” Lizzie screams, “she’s going to change—”

“Lizzie!” Carol shouts as the zombie that was Mika before she died opens its eyes, rises up, and returns the favor her sister did for her by ripping her throat out with her teeth.

It ends not with a whimper, but a bang. Lizzie gags as her sister chews on a chunk of her flesh and bleeds out in seconds. Carol shoots the zombified ten-year-old in the head and puts her pistol back in the holster on her thigh before her daughter throws herself into her arms. Daryl silently walks out of the shadows in the doorway with his crossbow loaded and locked on the dead twelve-year-old.

“No,” Lucy tells him before he puts a bolt in her between her eyes. “I need you to help me take her body to the infirmary.”

Daryl squints at her, scrutinizing. “Why?” he wants to know.

“I need to know why she did this,” Lucy informs him, “the virus could’ve been telling her to kill people so they would turn. If the latent infection is mutating, we need to know. I’m going to saw open her skull and take a look at her brain,” she bites her lip and shoots Carol an apologetic look before she orders, “take her to the infirmary. Now.”

After they strap her down, Lizzie reanimates and yowls around the black paisley fabric of the bandana Daryl knotted in her mouth as a makeshift gag. Lucy adjusts her safety goggles and swallows hard as her stomach roils. There’s a CT scan illuminated by the light box on wall and a MRI on the screen of her laptop to keep the neuroscience textbooks on the autopsy table company. Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek and picks up the bone saw from the metal tray of surgical instruments to her left.

 _For science,_ she thinks, and flips the switch.


	11. Luxury

**Come closer.**  
**There’s sunlight on the countertop**  
**and it looks a whole lot like**  
**the start of a tomorrow.**  
**Listen,**  
**it’s time to rinse all that**  
**leftover heartache  
**off of yourself.****

Ashe Vernon, “The Kitchen Sink”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 11**  
Luxury

* * *

_Monday, 6 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 512._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

It’s been a week since Hershel died, and the flu that killed him isn’t contagious anymore. A block has been decontaminated and everyone is back in C and D block, while the surplus of nonperishable supplies they’ve been gathering remain untainted in E and F block. B block is full of refrigerators, freezers, and coolers to preserve things like frozen meat, butter, milk, cheese, and cold drinks that wouldn’t fit in the walk-in freezer in the cafeteria. After they expanded their search grid to a hundred-mile radius, Daryl and Glenn took groups on runs to look for more antibiotics. Seventeen people died in the epidemic, and they’re not going to let that happen again if they can help it.

Lucy has spent days staring at the results of the diagnostic tests she conducted on Lizzie, as though new information might somehow magically appear if she looks at the data she collected long enough. Alas, no such thing happens. Lucy has to acknowledge her worst fear instead: the latent virus is mutating, and she’s out of time.

Nobody else in the fortress is infected with the mutated strain, if the samples that she took of their cerebrospinal fluid were anything to go by. Research shows that while the zombie virus can survive at subzero temperatures and it can live without oxygen because it’s a facultative anaerobic organism, it can’t survive the heat of a crematorium oven turned up all the way to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Lizzie didn’t have a chance to transmit it before she died and they incinerated her corpse, but that doesn’t mean the virus won’t spontaneously mutate again in someone else.

 _I need to get my hands on a genetic sequencer and synthesize a cure for this freaking disease_ , she thinks, _before it’s too late_.

“Lucy?” a hesitant male voice says and breaks the silence that had settled over her like a veil on a widow at a funeral.

When she looks up, Rick is looking at her with a hunch of discomfort rooted in his shoulders. “Crap,” Lucy mumbles and extracts her owl-shaped pocketwatch from the pocket of her skirt by its silver chain, “am I late for the run?” Then she notices it’s only ten, and they’re not going on the supply run until eleven. _I still can’t believe I’m awake before noon_ , she thinks as she muffles a yawn in the palm of the hand she isn’t using to check her watch. “What’s going on, Rick?” she asks.

“I need to talk to you about Carl,” Rick tells her with a hint of urgency in his voice.

Lucy adjusts her glasses and narrows her eyes at him. There are plenty of people he could be talking to about his teenage son instead of her: Morgan, who’s his closest friend in the group and whose son isn’t much older than Carl. Karen, who could give him a maternal perspective as the mother of a teenage boy. Michonne, who’s been sharing any comics she finds with Carl and eating breakfast with him almost every morning. Apparently they both like the same brand of sugar cereal, even though Rick hates it. Maybe because Rick hates it, since Carl seems to have fallen ass over elbows into his rebellious phase. Unfortunately, teenage rebellion in the zombie apocalypse is exponentially more complicated than it was before the world went to hell in a handbasket. _Why me?_ she thinks. “What about him?” she asks him.

“Carl…” Rick swallows hard before he confesses, “…he killed someone.”

Lucy gapes at him before she forces herself to shut her mouth before she lets the flies in. “What?” she blurts and bites down on the consonant incredulously. “When?”

“After you and Daryl went on the run to Big Lots,” Rick says, “I took him out into the woods to check the snares. There was this woman out there all alone,” he clenches his jaw around the word _alone_ , “she said she and her husband were starving so I tried to bring them some food. Only it turned out that her husband was a zombie and we were the food. Carl…” he hesitates before he says, “…he shot her. Didn’t even hesitate.”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek because none of this comes as a surprise to her. When the outbreak went global, Carl was only twelve and before his mother died he seemed even younger sometimes because Lori tried to shelter him in order to keep him from doing anything she didn’t agree with or approve of, like carrying a weapon even though monsters were—and still are—everywhere. Lucy didn’t hate Lori, but that doesn’t mean she thinks Lori was a good mother or that Rick is capable of parenting a traumatized child. Hell, Rick is barely capable of dealing with _his_ trauma in the aftermath of murdering his best friend and watching his wife die in childbirth. Carl had to shoot Lori because his father just shut down instead of keeping his shit together long enough to shoot her himself. Still, none of that is her problem and she’s not going to make it her problem unless Rick explicitly asks her what she thinks. Otherwise, it’s none of her business. “What do you want me to do about it?” Lucy wants to know.

“You said we were family,” Rick says, “after Lori…after she died.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound, “I did.”

“I want you to talk to Carl,” Rick tells her with a glint of desperation in his voice, “I don’t know how to help him.”

Lucy chews on her left thumbnail without biting through it. “Let’s take him on the supply run with us,” she suggests. “Let me see what we’re dealing with.”

“Okay,” Rick says, his tone making it clear even to someone as bad at social cues as she is that he thinks it’s a terrible idea.

Lucy tucks her owl-shaped watch back in her pocket and forces herself to look him in the eyes. _Let’s get this over with_ , she thinks.

* * *

_Monday, 6 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 512._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_Summergrove._

* * *

Jacqui divided their search grids into chunks that encompass one square mile. Their sweeps usually start with one grid, and they search another on the same run if they still have space in the rigs after they’ve swept the grid for anything salvageable and updated the inventory list. It’s taken months for them to scavenge chunks of Newnan grid by grid, but that meticulous approach has yielded more supplies than anything half-assed. There’s always a plethora of stuff in residential areas because at the beginning of the global outbreak most survivors targeted superstores or shopping centers and forgot that people keep all kinds of shit at home.

Summergrove was a hifalutin five-hundred-acre neighborhood pre-apocalypse with homes appraised at hundreds of thousands of dollars and assorted amenities like a golf course, tennis courts, outdoor pools, hiking trails, a private hundred-acre lake, playgrounds and parks for children, and a clubhouse for grownups with too much money. When the residents of that neighborhood evacuated, they mostly took things that had sentimental value or monetary value and left useful stuff behind. Maybe they had thought their things were replaceable, if they evacuated before the virus spread to the point that their neighbors were spontaneously amplifying in the street.

Those people were the lucky ones—the unlucky ones spontaneously amplified in the comfort of their opulent homes before they shambled out into the street to eat their neighbors.

Lucy, whose parents’ house was appraised for over two million, feels homesick in neighborhoods like Summergrove; even though her hometown had been too much of a kitschy Viking tourist trap to spawn a gated community. Poulsbo didn’t have anything fancier than Skittle houses—what she and her friends called the candy-colored housing development next to the ye olde touristy side of town—and her childhood home was only worth so much because her parents had put almost two decades of hard work into remodeling the property so they could sell it and retire. Which they never got a chance to actually do, because the world had ended before her father was eligible for his employee pension and her mother had refused to retire until he did because not working while her husband still had a job would’ve made her go stir crazy. Neither of her parents were particularly good at being instead of doing.

Daryl just feels like a fish out of water. Summergrove is maybe ten miles from where his Uncle Jess had lived in a shack in the woods, but it feels like a different world—one where he doesn’t belong. “Who in the hell needs so many pairs of shoes?” he asks as Lucy steps into a walk-in closet in the master bedroom of the house they’re looting and checks for hidden storage compartments behind the clothes.

Lucy shrugs. “If you wear the best shoes,” she murmurs, “they’ll take you to the best places. That’s what my mom used to say,” she tells him, “but my mom sometimes wore knee-high beige suede boots with tassels and fringe on them so I don’t know if her definition of what constitutes ‘the best shoes’—” she crooks her fingers like quotation marks around the words, “—is the same as mine.”

Daryl squints at her, scrutinizing. Lucy doesn’t talk much about her family: he just knows they loved her, and that she misses them. “Your parents had a closet like this?” he asks.

Lucy ducks her head and nods, a sharp descent of her chin. “After they remodeled the house,” she says, “my mom turned one of the upstairs rooms into an office with a huge closet. When you work in the dean’s office at a university, you need to dress to impress. Which is why she had an obscene amount of blazers and dress slacks. No shoe collection, though. I didn’t have a lot in common with my mom, but we both hated high heels.”

Daryl hums low in his throat, a soft _huh_. Lucy has a lot of clothes, especially by post-apocalyptic standards. While most of the women in the group wear jeans and t-shirts, she always wears dresses or skirts on top of her protective legwear. Lucy never got into the habit of wearing makeup because her skin is too sensitive and she couldn’t wear heels now even if she wanted to because of her ankle, but she’s still pretty girly in spite of all that. Which doesn’t change how competent and lethal she is. It actually makes her more dangerous, since most people don’t automatically think of a woman dressed in floral print and eyelet lace as a threat. “You think they would’ve liked me?” he asks her with something quiet and vulnerable in the grit of his voice.

Lucy turns to look at him over her shoulder. “You make me happy,” she tells him shyly. “That’s all my parents ever wanted for me, so yes. I think they would’ve approved.”

Daryl puts his crossbow on the floor and walks over to stand behind her before he uses one hand to tilt her chin up and hunches to kiss her so hard her knees go weak, the fingers his other hand splayed possessively over her hip while he holds her flush against him with her back to his chest. It’s the only way he knows how to tell her that she makes him happy too without being too corny. Daryl has never been good with words, but he’s better than he ever was because of her.

Lucy hooks her arm around his neck to tangle her fingers in his hair and feels his growl resonate low in his throat and reverberate up through his jaw in the slant of his mouth devouring hers. Daryl tastes like the sticks of true cinnamon he chews and he smells like motor oil because he spent the morning tuning up his bike. When she sucks on the soft tip of his tongue, his hand clamps down on the plump hyperbola of her hip and he moans into her mouth.

There’s the family you’re born into, and the family you choose for yourself. No matter how much she misses her parents, Daryl is her family now too. There’s no one else she would rather be with and nowhere else that she would rather be.


	12. Grown Up Wrong

**There’s a reason we love movies about zombies:**  
**when something doesn’t die, we**  
**remember permanence.**  
**For now I keep it in the back of my closet,**  
**right behind your tenderness, a bin full of something cliché**  
**like a promise, or unconditional love.**

Dorothy McGinnis, “Love”

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 12**  
Grown Up Wrong

* * *

 _Monday, 6 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 512._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_Summergrove._

* * *

Daryl pins her between him and the door of the walk-in closet so her body is flush against his from hip to chest, his hands tangling in her hair and cupping her face while he licks into her mouth and strokes her tongue with his. It’s a hard possessive kiss, the rough sweetness of his lips amplified by the sensation of his beard and stubble rubbing against her chin and his calloused thumb caressing the jut of her jaw while his fingertips dig into the nape of her neck. Still, he’s not trying to take her further than a kiss; his dick is getting hard against the flab of her stomach, but he’s not really dry humping her so much as holding her in place with his hips and he seems perfectly content to keep his hands in the vicinity of her head.

Lucy is tempted to stay in the closet with Daryl and make out with him for the rest of the afternoon instead of sweeping the neighborhood, but Summergrove is huge and they’re burning daylight. “Okay,” she whispers and ekes the _oh_ sound out into a soft _ooh_ , “we need to stop.”

Daryl hums low in his throat and hunches to nuzzle her nose before he backs off. “Yeah,” he says gruffly, “didn’t Rick ask ya’ t’ talk to’ Carl about somethin’?”

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound. “Apparently he shot a woman in the face and Rick has no idea how to handle it.”

Daryl frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing. Carl has taken the trauma of the apocalypse to heart in a way that Sophia and Duane haven’t, because the parent that Sophia lost was an abusive piece of shit and Duane watched his mother die horribly and then come back to haunt him and his father; but he wasn’t stuck on the sidelines of a toxic love triangle that ended with his father stabbing his surrogate father to death. Noah was sheltered from the worst of the apocalypse in Woodbury and Julie was stuck in a bunker for months where nothing could hurt her, so their post-apocalyptic experiences aren’t quite as fucked up. _Rick needs t’ start a support group with the other parents or somethin’_ , he thinks, _they probably need someone t’ talk t’ just as bad as their kids do_. “Carl killed somebody,” he murmurs. “Rick didn’t tell me that.”

Lucy shrugs and fusses with the blunt sweep of her bangs—they’re getting long enough to sneak underneath the plastic frames of her glasses and poke her in the eyes. “Rick thinks Carl needs to talk to someone about his childhood trauma,” she says matter-of-factly, “and no one is better at talking about childhood trauma than me. I’m ninety-seven percent sure you fell for me because I made you feel comfortable talking about yours.”

Daryl smiles at that as she opens the closet door and shuffles out into the hallway, writing a list of inventory down in the notebook she always keeps in her pocket. “How come you’re always sayin’ I should talk about shit,” he murmurs, “but ya’ won’t tell me nothin’ about your parents?”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek before she answers his question. “I say that you should talk about things because you bottled over forty years’ worth of shit up before we met,” she says, “and if you let bad stuff pressurize shit gets ugly. When we were at the quarry, your default response to stress was violent outbursts. Rick told you that he left Merle on that rooftop in Atlanta and I had to intervene because you tried to stab him. When you were younger, I bet you got in a lot of fights and you had a lot of sex to blow off steam.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. It’s hard not to feel defensive, even though he knows that Lucy’s just stating the facts and saying what they both already know. “Yeah,” he mutters, “I was an asshole. So what?”

“So,” Lucy sighs, “my feelings about my parents aren’t bad. I don’t talk about them because those feelings are…” she swallows thickly, “…those feelings were good. I always felt like such a freak of nature growing up, but I never felt unwanted or unloved. I had parents who loved me and supported me and they were always there for me,” she exhales a heavy whoosh of air before she adds, “and I don’t have that anymore.”

Daryl watches her shoulders tense and shake as she tries not to cry, tears stinging the corners of her eyes. When she cries, his heart clenches horribly in his chest and he hesitates before he puts an arm around her shoulders because he doesn’t know if she wants him to touch her or not. Daryl has never thought of Lucy as being fragile, but he can see the cracks in her heart in the gnarl of her shoulders and he’s terrified that touching her might hurt her even worse.

Lucy swallows around the lump in her throat. “I’ve wished they were here so many times,” she tells him through her tears. “I’ve wished they were dead, so they can stay who they are in the memories I have of them and those feelings won’t change.”

Daryl cuddles her closer to him as she gulps and wipes her tears with the back of her hand, staining the sleeve of the soft faded gray henley she wore underneath her dress. “Have you talked t’ Neeley about this?” he asks.

“Yup,” Lucy mumbles, “and he agrees with me. Our parents were good people,” she bites her lip and looks up into his eyes without shying away, “they wouldn’t have been able to live in this world. It would’ve ruined them. I don’t want that.”

Daryl hunches to kiss her forehead and tries to think of some right things to say. “You’re good people,” he tells her softly, “they’d be proud.”

 _No_ , Lucy thinks as she extricates herself from him, _they wouldn’t_.

* * *

Lucy and Daryl find the Grimes boys in a house down the block and they hear them before they see them.

“Hey, asshole!” Carl yells and bangs his fist against the wall. “Hey, shitface! Hey—”

“Watch your mouth!” Rick snaps and gnashes his teeth around the word _mouth_.

“Are you kidding me?” Carl snaps back. “If there’s one of them down here, they would’ve come out. I didn’t forget while you had us playing farmer. I still know how to survive. I don’t need you to protect me anymore,” he clenches his jaw and glares at his father. “I can take care of myself. You probably can’t even protect me anyways!” he shouts and his voice cracks under the pressure of the words. “You couldn’t protect Mom! I don’t need you anymore. I’d be fine if you died—”

Lucy sighs and bangs her cane against the floor of the hallway behind them, the hollow sound ricocheting as they both turn to look at her. “Okay,” she says, “that’s enough. Rick, go with Daryl to raid the kitchen. Carl, upstairs. Now.”

Daryl watches as Lucy hobbles up the stairs in pursuit of the sullen teenager and grins. “Y’know,” he says as Rick follows him into the kitchen and opens the fridge, “she thinks she ain’t gonna be a good mom.”

Rick snorts. “Well,” he says, “she’s already got the mom voice down to a science.”

Daryl hums low in his throat, a soft _mm-hmm_. There’s some canned food in the cabinets and a bottle of syrup with the seal intact, but everything else has gone to mold and rotted.

Rick side-eyes him while he unfurls a canvas tote and bags the nonperishables. “Are you and Lucy thinking about having kids?” he asks.

Daryl shrugs. “We ain’t gonna repopulate the earth anytime soon,” he says, “but someday? Yeah.”

Rick starts opening the drawers to check for anything on the list of essentials—batteries, in particular. “You’re gonna be a great dad,” he says matter-of-factly.

Daryl smiles in spite of the way his guts lurch at the compliment because of the expectations that come with it. Old habits die hard, and he still isn’t used to anybody expecting anything great from him. “Thanks, man,” he says. Like he means it.

When she catches up with Carl, he’s sitting on the roof of the house and trying to open a ginormous can of pudding with his knife. Lucy clambers out the window and onto the rooftop with all the grace of a swan trying to swim with only one leg before she offers him the automated can opener that she carries around in her backpack. “You planning to eat that whole can in one sitting?” she asks.

“Maybe,” Carl says as the mechanized whir of the can opener fades into silence and he throws the circle of metal it cut out into the air like a frisbee. “You want to share?”

Lucy shakes her head slowly as she tries not to look down over the edge of the roof. It’s not so high up that a fall would kill her, but that doesn’t make her irrational fear of heights or the internal screaming that ensues go away. “Nah,” she says, “pudding makes me think of hospitals. I hate hospitals.”

“Me too,” Carl says before he eats a spoonful of pudding.

Lucy wonders idly where he got a spoon before she bites the bullet. “Rick asked me to talk to you,” she says, “he told me about the woman you shot in the woods.”

Carl scrunches up his shoulders defensively. “I made the right call,” he says, “she would’ve hurt someone else if we let her go.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “I know,” she murmurs.

“You do?” Carl blurts out incredulously. Apparently he wasn’t expecting her to condone what he did. Rick certainly doesn’t.

Lucy ducks her head and nods again. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound, “my only regret about what happened with the Governor is that I didn’t shoot him that day at the mill. You know,” she puts her cane behind her to keep it from slipping away, “he kept his zombified daughter in a cage and he told Milton that he wanted to lock me up in a lab after he massacred our people because he wanted to keep me safe. I’m not saying Rick is anything like him, but sometimes parents don’t know how to let their kids be their own people.”

“Yeah,” Carl mutters, “he just doesn’t understand me. Nobody does.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. _I remember the Nobody Understands Me phase of puberty_ , she thinks. _I wouldn’t relive that malarkey for all the Dr. Pepper in the world_. “I don’t know why he thought we should talk,” she admits. “I’m not good with kids. I wasn’t good with kids back when I _was_ a kid. I’ve been in survival mode since I was younger than you. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gotten out of junior high alive if I hadn’t gone totally numb. I was bullied, and I was raped, but I survived. When I was a teenager, I couldn’t imagine that I was ever going to feel any better than I did, and I felt like shit. I actually tried to kill myself when I was about your age,” she exhales a quiet gust of anxious laughter and thumbs the slub of scar tissue on the inside of her left wrist. “I’m also autistic and I had an anxiety disorder and clinical depression that was undiagnosed at the time,” she clarifies, “but I’m pretty sure being a teenager sucks for neurotypical people too.”

“It feels like something is wrong with me,” Carl tells her and his voice cracks again with a pitch that doesn’t quite hide the hint of fear in his words.

Lucy shrugs again. “If you think you have some kind of mental illness on top of being traumatized and being a teenager,” she says, “we can take a fMRI of your brain to check for a chemical imbalance like my reduced serotonin transmission and have Alice and Caleb prescribe meds or make a plan for some other form of treatment. There’s nothing wrong with you, Carl. I think it’s just growing pains, but either way we can get you all the help you need.”

Carl narrows his eyes at her. “When you kill people,” he says, “do you feel anything?”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “I feel better,” she answers honestly, “because I’ve never killed anybody who didn’t deserve to die. Nate was a rapist and Blake was a mass murderer who slaughtered dozens of children. I believe the world is a better place because I killed them. I don’t know how it would feel to kill someone who didn’t deserve it, but I wouldn’t hesitate to kill someone who might not deserve to die if that someone was trying to hurt the people that I love.”

“I shot the woman in the woods because she tried to stab my dad,” Carl tells her. “I didn’t _want_ to, but I had to.”

Lucy catches sight of Duane and Morgan staring at them from down the street and waves to them, her fingers snarling into the hollow of her palm. “I know,” she says.


	13. Winning Ugly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You will pry my headcanon about Rick being mentally ill from my cold, dead hands.

**Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.**

Leslie Jamison, _The Empathy Exams_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 13**  
Winning Ugly

* * *

_Monday, 6 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 512._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_Summergrove._

* * *

Carl finds Rick sitting at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for him. “Where’s Daryl?” he asks before he sits on the step above his father.

“Outside,” Rick tells him, “going over the inventory with the others.”

Carl ducks his head and nods. There are a dozen people sweeping the acreage in pairs. Milton, Gert, Morgan, Duane, Sophia, Carol, Andrea, and Michonne are talking to Daryl and inputting the information they gathered into a tablet. Their localized internet covers a ten-mile radius in order to sustain a surveillance network of security cameras all over the barricade of shipping containers, and data synced from the tablet is automatically uploaded to the main server in the fortress. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I wouldn’t be fine if you died. I shouldn’t have said that. I just…” he sighs and shakes his head before he says, “…things are different now, Dad, but it feels like you don’t see that—like you don’t want to—and I hate it.”

“I know we’ll never get things back to the way they used to be,” Rick says. “I only clung to that for you, for Judith…” _for Lori_ , he thinks, “…but you’re a man now, Carl. I know that, and I’m sorry.”

Carl shakes his head again. “You don’t need to be,” he says.

Rick swallows thickly. “What did Lucy say to you?” he wants to know.

Carl shrugs. “Lucy thinks I should get a fMRI,” he says, “to see if I’m mentally ill like she is.”

“You should,” Rick tells him softly. “It runs in the family.”

Carl frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing. “What?” he asks.

Rick looks down at his hands. “I have schizoaffective disorder,” he murmurs, “it’s kind of like bipolar disorder, but I get hallucinations on top of the mood swings and hypomania. I’ve been living with it since I was in high school. I went through withdrawal before I woke up in the hospital and I didn’t get back on my meds until your mom died and I had a nervous breakdown. I talked to Lucy about it, and we found my antipsychotics at a pharmacy nearby a few months ago. I haven’t been carrying my gun because adjusting to antipsychotics can make the symptoms worse for a while and Lucy wanted to make sure that no one would get hurt. I wasn’t going to tell you about it until you were older, but after everything you’ve been going through I thought you should know now.”

Carl stares at his father as comprehension dawns. It wasn’t that something was wrong with him. Rick had been worried that he shot the woman in the woods because he was having a psychotic break. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s not the end of the world.”

Famous last words.

* * *

Lucy stays on the roof after Carl takes his empty can of pudding and goes to talk to Rick because she’s fucking terrified of making one wrong move and falling hard enough to crack her skull open. It’s not a rational fear, but tragically her anxiety doesn’t give a shit. Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips in a futile attempt to decompress and flinches as her earpiece beeps.

“Medusa,” Nico says on the other end of the frequency. “What the hell are you doing up there?”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and waves to the drone staring at her with its camera eye, fingers gnarling into the hollow of her palm. “I remember going to Paris,” she murmurs, “and having a panic attack halfway up the Eiffel Tower. It was a hell of a way to find out that I’m afraid of heights.”

Nico snickers and Lucy can hear the grin in her voice. “You didn’t even know the Eiffel Tower was brown,” she says.

Lucy rolls her eyes. “I’d only ever seen the Eiffel Tower in old black and white movies like _Casablanca_ ,” she retorts, “or illuminated at night. I couldn’t tell what color it was until I saw it live and in person.”

“I’d never been on a plane before I went to grad school in Scotland,” Cath says.

Lucy snorts as the drone whirls in midair and flies off to sweep the rest of the neighborhood. “I don’t miss flying,” she says, “planes are sensory hell.”

It occurs to her that she hasn’t been hanging out with her friends lately outside of their weekly movie nights, a double feature every Tuesday. Cath keeps wanting to watch the extended edition of the _Lord of the Rings_ film trilogy all in one night, bemoaning how she can never go visit Hobbiton in New Zealand now that air travel is a thing of the past.

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek as she thinks back to the last conversation she and her friends had that wasn’t about their plans for surviving the winter. It was before her wedding, over a month ago. _I’ve been depressed and withdrawn from pretty much everyone but Daryl_ , she thinks. _I told him that don’t want anything to change my memories of who my parents were. Maybe I’ve been trying to ignore how much we’ve all changed, too_.

“Hey,” Nico says to break the momentary silence, “you know how I’ve been in more pain than I should be even though I’m back on the pill?”

Nico has Stage III endometriosis, a chronic pain condition that results in pelvic inflammation and ovarian cysts; she had two large endometriomas surgically removed pre-apocalypse, and she has to live with pain stemming from pelvic adhesions. While the pill works as a pain reliever because the combination of estrogen and progestin reduces menstruation, endometriosis has no cure. Lucy had been hoarding birth control pills for Nico as much as for herself before they settled at the fortress.

“What’s wrong?” Cath asks her with a lurch of worry in her voice, “do you have another cyst?”

Nico sighs. “No,” she says, “the pain has gotten so bad that I’m going to have my adhesions removed this weekend. I don’t know how extensive the damage is, but Dr. Stevens thinks she might have to take out my ovary.”

“Shit,” Lucy mutters. There’s up to a fifty percent chance of infertility for people with endometriosis, and that chance gets higher if an ovary is removed. Cath doesn’t want to have children and Lucy is terrified of being a mother, but Nico has always unequivocally wanted kids. “Nico, I’m so sorry.”

Nico swallows hard, the sound of her throat working soft but audible on the radio. “Amy suggested we freeze my eggs after we did a biopsy and found out they’re still viable,” she says, “but we don’t have the technology to dehydrate the eggs and keep ice crystals from destroying them or a freezer cold enough to store them longterm.”

“There are fertility clinics in Newnan,” Kate says, “we can get the technology.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods, even though her friends can’t see what she’s doing. “If you want to freeze your eggs,” she says, “we can make that happen.”

“Have you talked to T-Dog about this?” Cath asks.

Nico makes a noise in the back of her throat, a soft _uh-huh_. “T’s been worried about me,” she says, “he hates that I’m hurting.”

“Tomorrow we can scavenge every fertility clinic in the area to scrounge up the equipment you need,” Lucy says. “Tonight I’m going to make you cookies.”

Nico perks up. Lucy makes the best cookies, because she’s been perfecting her recipe for twenty years. When she bakes with someone in mind, she tweaks the recipe for them specifically. “Chocolate chip?” she asks. “With almond extract and extra brown sugar?”

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound. “Whatever you want.”

* * *

Michonne takes one look at the intangible weight Rick seems to have shrugged off the worried slump that has been rooted in his shoulders for too long and takes Carl aside as soon as they’re out of the house. “Find anything good?” she asks. “Candy bars? Comic books? Crazy Cheese?” Carl stares at her as she whips out the can. “Bam!” she says. “Crazy Cheese. Found it still sealed and everything. Now,” she grins at him, “I’ll be nice and let you have the first pull.”

“No thanks,” Carl tells her. Talking about mental illness and murder doesn’t exactly put someone in the mood for cheese, especially fake cheese that comes in a spray can.

“You sure?” Michonne asks.

“I’m fine,” Carl mutters.

Michonne narrows her eyes at him as they walk down the street, away from the others. “You don’t seem fine,” she says once they’re out of earshot.

“I’m just tired,” Carl tells her. It’s not even a lie. “Okay?”

Michonne does the only thing that comes to mind: she sprays fake cheese into her mouth and yowls like a zombie. Carl stares at her as a whiz of cheese falls out of her mouth onto the pavement. Michonne sighs and swallows the Crazy Cheese. It’s bacon flavored, with a truly revolting aftertaste. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not very good at making boys your age laugh.”

“I was laughing,” Carl says unconvincingly, “on the inside.”

Michonne shakes her head slowly. “Toddlers find me funny,” she informs him, “my three-year-old son happens to find me extremely funny.”

Andrea ducks her head in a futile attempt to hide a grin as she watches Rick watch her girlfriend. Now isn’t the time to call him on his crush, but that doesn’t stop her from imagining the gobsmacked look he would give her if she ever brought up the possibility of polyamory. Things might’ve worked out better with Shane if Rick and Lori had been a little more openminded, and a lot more honest with themselves about how broken their marriage was.

Michonne smiles, dazzling from a distance. Andrea watches Rick catch up with his son and he smiles back at her. None of them see the men at the other end of the cul-de-sac until it’s almost too late.

* * *

Lucy is still trying to beat her depression into submission when Daryl puts his hand on her shoulder. It takes all of her carefully cultivated control to swallow the scream that bubbles up and condensates in the back of her throat. Lucy turns and looks over her shoulder, the panicked spike in her heartbeat smoothed out by the sight of him at her back.

Daryl squeezes her shoulder, and the way he looks at her turns his touch into something more intimate than innocuous. “C’mon,” he murmurs, “you’ve been up here too long.”

Lucy clutches at his sinewy arm with one hand as she uses her cane to get back on her feet and lets him steer her through the open window. It’s the closest to being a damsel in distress that she’s ever going to get.

“Medusa,” Alec says urgently over the radio as she shuts the window and latches it more out of habit than anything else, “we’ve got company.”

Lucy hobbles down the stairs with Daryl and finds Gert waiting for them at the foot of the stairs with the tablet in her hand.

“It’s them,” Gert says as she shows Lucy the live camera feed broadcasting from their drone three blocks away, “the men who tried to gangrape Gilda and me. There aren’t thirty of them anymore, but their leader is alive.”

Daryl squints at the screen, his gaze scrutinizing. “I know him,” he says, “his name’s Joe. I remember him from the shop where I used t’ buy my huntin’ gear and shit.”

Lucy taps her earpiece. “Glenn,” she says, “the Claimers are here. I need backup. There are only ten of them, but I’m not taking any chances.”

Glenn swallows hard and glances at Gilda, who doesn’t have her earpiece in because most of the people at the fortress don’t wear a radio at all times. “Shoot to kill?” he asks.

Lucy nods. These men gangraped two underage girls while their father watched—they deserve a hell of a lot worse than a bullet in the head. “Take no prisoners,” she orders.

Daryl narrows his eyes at the feed and grits his teeth. “Shit,” he hisses.

“What?” Lucy asks.

Daryl taps the tablet and shows her the screen. “Carl,” he says, “they’ve got Carl.”


	14. Don’t Be a Stranger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : JSYK, this chapter is approximately 48% smut. Lucy and Daryl also haven’t gotten any better at not having sex in weird places—pun unintended. Beware.
> 
>  **Additional Tags** : Rough Kissing, Rough Sex, Blowjobs, Face Fucking, Dirty Talk, Nipple Licking, Vaginal Sex, Motorcycle Sex.

**This is not a fairytale.**  
**There is no princess.**  
**There is no damsel.**  
**There is no queen.**  
**There is no tower.**  
**There are no dragons.**  
**There is simply a girl**  
**faced with the difficult task**  
**of learning to believe**  
**in herself.**

Amanda Lovelace, “Warning I”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 14**  
Don’t Be a Stranger

* * *

_Monday, 6 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 512._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_Summergrove._

* * *

Lucy always did her best under pressure, but then she ended up smack dab in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and met her biological father the mass murderer. It threw off her groove, and she couldn’t let herself admit that her ability to adapt was limited until she got slapped in the face by her own mental illness yet again.

Only now cracking under the pressure isn’t an option, because a fourteen-year-old boy could get hurt or worse if she makes the wrong move. Andrea, Michonne, and Rick are in the house too; if they haven’t been captured by the Claimers yet, it’s just a matter of time.

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek and taps her earpiece. “Alec,” she murmurs, “send the drone to fly by the windows of the house they’re in. Maybe we can lure some of them out into the street and thin the herd before we go in with guns blazing.”

“Rick,” Daryl says gruffly, “if you’re hearin’ this, don’t do nothin’ stupid. We’re comin’ for ya’.”

Lucy makes a garbled noise as a bloodcurdling scream rings out on the other end of the frequency, the same noise echoing the stale air from three blocks away. “I don’t think he heard you,” she deadpans before she breaks into a lopsided sprint. It hurts to run, but avoiding pain isn’t high on her list of priorities at the moment.

When she huffs and puffs up onto the stoop of the house, Lucy smacks into a man with a missing arm—it’s a fresh flesh wound, and she has a hunch that Michonne chopped it off before he turned and tried to run without bothering to use a tourniquet or something to stop the gush of blood spurting out of the deep cut where his elbow had been.

Lucy shoots him in the face, the sound of the gunshot like a quiet riot because she put her earplugs in while she was on the run. Daryl shoots another man who screeches like a bat out of hell in the eye before he can put a bullet in her.

When she walks into the entryway, Lucy almost slips in the blood on the floor before she sees the carnage in the sitting room. Rick looks eerily reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter. There’s blood staining his beard, his chin, his mouth. If the dead man on the floor is any indication, it’s because he ripped someone’s throat out with his teeth. Carl is clinging to Michonne and crying long overdue tears. Andrea wipes at a smear of blood on her cheek and smiles as she puts her knife back in its sheath. There’s a corpulent man with a slit throat on the floor by her feet.

Lucy narrows her eyes behind her glasses at the only man left alive—a scuzzy Claimer with a compound bow in one hand and an arrow in the other—and shoots him in the head. No questions asked. “Alec,” she wheezes as she takes one earplug out so she can put her radio back in, “change of plans. We need a cleanup crew, not a cavalry. Rick did something very stupid: he made a fucking mess.”

* * *

_Monday, 6 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 512._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

It feels very anticlimactic, all told. Lucy has been lowkey worried about running afoul of the Claimers ever since they had to flee the farm, and now one of the most nebulous threats to her people has been eliminated. It feels good, like winning at the apocalypse.

Daryl speeds up and guns the engine of his bike until the others are eating their dust. Lucy smooths one palm up the inside of his thigh on top of the worn fabric of his jeans, asking him a question with her hand instead of using her words because he can’t hear her at eighty miles an hour. Daryl answers by turning onto the next dirt road and riding along a trail into the woods.

Lucy unloops her arms until they’re not tangled up around his waist and taps her earpiece while he parks his bike and rises to his feet. “Nothing’s wrong,” she murmurs. “Rick can take Carl home to the fortress, but I want the rest of you to finish the sweep. We need as many supplies as possible to get us through the winter and I’m not going to let this put us behind schedule. Alec, use drones to make sure none of them got away. If you find any survivors, they should be terminated with extreme prejudice. Our territory is a no rapist and no pedophile zone.”

Daryl hums low in his throat, a quiet _mm-hmm_. “Zero tolerance for them douchebags,” he says before he takes his radio out of his ear and stares down at her as she shucks her jacket and folds it over the seat behind her. Daryl squints at her as she yanks her dress up over her head to reveal the shirt and leggings underneath. “Lucy,” he murmurs, “what the hell?”

Lucy bites her lip and looks up into the smoldering blue of his eyes. “I just…” she tugs her bottom lip in between her teeth and tries to articulate as she unstraps the brace on her immobilized wrist and unbuttons her shirt, “I need…”

Daryl nods brusquely. Lucy is a control freak, and sometimes that means what she craves the most is loss of control. Daryl is the only person she trusts to give her that—to make her feel totally out of control and incongruously safe with him at the same time. It’s one of the sweetest things about her, one of the things that only he knows. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils as a flare of heat shoots down his spine because the sight of her sitting on his bike in nothing but that black and white polka dot bra and panty set of hers is straight out of one of his fantasies. “Yeah,” he drawls as she peels her leggings off. “I know what ya’ need, darlin’. Get down on your knees for me.”

Lucy plops her jacket on the ground because she’s crippled and she’s not going to get down and dirty without protecting her joints. Daryl goes to sit down sideways on the seat of his bike and shucks his winged vest before he tangles one hand in the hair at the nape of her neck where her braid is slithering loose and hunches to kiss her, hard and rough and deep. Nothing is sweet or gentle about the slant of his uncouth mouth on hers, his hand fisted in her hair, his beard scraping the stubborn curve of her chin.

It’s a good thing she’s not in the mood for sweet or gentle. Lucy splays one of her hands over the inside of his thigh for balance and kisses him back ferociously, slowly furling her tongue in between his teeth and licking into his mouth as the fingers of her other hand snarl into the soft fabric of his shirt. It’s a strange combination of sensations: the worn denim of his jeans beneath her palm, his hand tugging on her hair just hard enough to make her moan sharply, the grind of detritus and dirt under her jacket and knees.

Daryl untangles the hand in her hair before he unzips his fly and gets his dick out. Lucy unbuttons his shirt from the bottom up and scoops her fingers underneath his undershirt to smooth her hands over the lean muscles of his stomach and back.

“Hands off,” he says gruffly, “put ’em behind your back ’til I tell ya’ different.”

Daryl hadn’t been comfortable with the whole giving her orders thing at first beyond dirty talk stock phrases like “come for me” and “suck my dick.” It’s one of her kinks, not really one of his. Daryl has never been a talkative guy, and he didn’t ever talk much during sex before Lucy—before he found out that his voice can get her soaking wet if he’s bossing her around or telling her what’s on his mind. How pretty she looks with his cock in her mouth. How soft and perfect her tits are, with stretch marks around the circumferences of them and freckles all over. How good her pussy tastes. How much he loves her. How she’s the only sweetness and light he’s ever known. How he loves the darkest parts of her, too; her brutality and ruthlessness and cruelty.

Lucy thinks he fell ass over elbows in love with her because he felt comfortable talking to her about his childhood trauma, but that’s not true. It’s because he feels comfortable talking to her about anything and everything. Only sometimes he’s still more comfortable with showing her exactly how he feels instead of telling her.

Daryl rubs the head of his dick against her cheek, smearing his precome on her skin and making her flush a brighter shade of blotchy red. With her shirt off, he can see the blush seep down from her face to the tops of her breasts. Daryl is tempted to tell her to take off her bra and use those perfect tits of hers on his dick, but coming all over her chest isn’t an option while they’re out in the open and he’s not planning to come in her mouth either way so instead he rubs the head of his dick along the seam of her lips and lets her peel his foreskin back with slow flicks and swirls of her tongue. “I’m gonna fuck your face,” he growls and fists his hand in her hair again to tilt her head up so he can look her in the eyes while his dick goes down her throat, “and you’re gonna take it like a good little slut. Ain’t that right?”

Lucy spent an inordinate amount of time overthinking the antifeminist implications of getting off on being dominated and being called sexist things like a slut before she forced herself to stop. There are more important things to overthink in the apocalypse, like how to manufacture their own cleaning supplies and build enough solar panels for them to eventually fortify the houses surrounded by their bulwark of shipping containers and move families out of the fortress. Lucy being a little bit kinkier than she originally thought isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, especially not at the fucking end of the world.

Pun intended.

Lucy moans around his girth, his cock heavy on her tongue. It takes her a second to get her gag reflex under control before she strokes her tongue over the underside in rough swipes, sucking and swallowing and gagging while he fucks her face. Lucy shuts her eyes and squeezes her thick thighs together as her arousal drips out of her to soak through her panties. It’s kind of obscene, since all he’s done is kiss her once and put his dick in her mouth; but if she wasn’t a slut for Daryl she never would’ve given him permission to call her that. Lucy interlaces her fingers behind her back to avoid giving into the temptation to touch herself even though her clit is swollen and _throbbing_ with the need for more friction.

Daryl eventually yanks her to feet by her hair and lifts her up with his other hand under her fat ass to take their height difference out of the equation. Lucy swallows the precome he was pouring down her throat and lets him lay her down on top of his bike. There’s sweat pooled at the small of her back and it sticks to the faux leather seat while he straddles the frame and uses his thumb to pull the crotch of her panties aside. “Shit,” he drawls and stretches the _i_ sound out until the word sounds downright filthy. “You’re drippin’ for me, darlin’. You want it that bad?”

Lucy doesn’t get a chance to answer because he hunches over her, dragging the flat of his tongue over where the stain of his precome had dried on her cheek before he kisses her desperately and ducks his head to nuzzle her neck while he digs a condom out of his back pocket and rolls the rubber onto his cock.

“ _Mine_ ,” Daryl growls and rubs the blunt head of him up against the shine of her soaking wet slit to her clit while he nips at her throat.

Lucy arches her back and threads her fingers into his unkempt hair while he tugs at her bra and pushes her breasts together to nibble on both of her nipples, licking and sucking the hard nubs into the slick heat of his mouth. “Yours,” she tells him softly and hooks one of her legs around his waist to give him a better angle before he buries himself balls deep inside of her.

Daryl nuzzles the hollow in between her breasts and huffs out a stuttering breath. Lucy’s so worked up that she’s lowkey pulsing around him even though she hasn’t come yet, and he doesn’t want to blow his load before he makes her come all over his cock at least once. Daryl kisses the hollow of her throat and skims one hand down over her soft flabby stomach while he fucks her hard enough to make the frame of his bike shake with every thrust, until he’s too lost in the overwhelming smell and taste and sound of her to give a shit about the possibility of tipping over. Lucy sinks her teeth into the meat of his shoulder and clenches around him like a vice while he rubs her clit in sloppy circles with the rough pad of his thumb. Daryl groans and rubs harder to make her come again and again and again, until his balls tighten almost violently and he spills himself into the condom with a grunt that he muffles in the soft frizz of her hair.

Lucy unhooks the leg she hitched around his waist and exhales a soft whoosh of air. Daryl swallows hard in spite of how dry his mouth is and tries not to wince at the sensation of her clenching tight with his oversensitized dick still in her. Lucy squirms under him to grab her backpack and offers the bottle of water she always carries around to him. “Thank you,” she murmurs while he takes a long slurp of water, “that was exactly what I needed.”

Daryl hums low in his throat and rolls the condom off before he ties a knot in the used rubber. Lucy extracts a plastic bag from her backpack and holds it out to him. There’s a bunch of shit like used tissues, shells from sunflower seeds, and crumpled band-aid wrappers inside. “Why’re you worried ’bout litterin’ with them dead things walkin’ around?” he asks.

Lucy shrugs, one-shouldered. “Who’s going to clean up the world, if not us?” she retorts.

Daryl puts his winged vest on and buttons it back up while he squints at her, scrutinizing. “You okay?” he asks.

Lucy shrugs again. “Sometimes I just need to give up control,” she says. “You know that.”

“Yeah,” Daryl says, “but it ain’t somethin’ you ask for unless you’re workin’ through somethin’ else in your head.”

Lucy takes a long gulp from her water bottle and puts it back in the pocket on the side of her backpack. It’s sinking in all over again, how much things have changed. Once upon a time Lucy was a virgin who called her parents every Friday night and never left her apartment, even after lightning struck one of the gnarled old trees outside her window and started a fire—and now she’s the kind of girl who shoots child rapists in the face and has sex with her husband in the woods on top of his motorcycle in the middle of the day. It’s kind of mindblowing. Cognitive dissonance galore. “I’ve been depressed because I’m a different person now,” she tells him softly. “I’ve lost so much of who I was: my family, my home, my future. I worked so hard to get my depression under control and to put myself through school and become a librarian and I never even got to start that archival job I had lined up…” she exhales a loud sigh that slumps her shoulders before she adds, “…and I’m not saying I’d trade you or what we have or any of the lives we’ve saved for my parents or Stella or that job, because I wouldn’t. Sometimes I just miss who I might’ve been if none of this ever happened.”

Daryl watches as she mops up the sweat she worked up with the shirt she wore underneath her dress and shoves the damp wad of fabric into her backpack. “You think we still would’ve found each other?” he asks her with a hint of vulnerability in the grit of his voice.

Lucy yanks her dress over her head and smiles at him shyly as she rises to her feet and shimmies to put her leggings back on. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound. “I like to think so.”

Daryl cups her face in both hands and kisses her softly, sweetly, slowly. Lucy curls her fingers into the fabric of the sleeves on his forearms and kisses him back until the earpiece she squirreled away beeps. Daryl extracts his radio from the pocket of his jeans. “Yeah,” he says to whoever’s on the other end of the frequency. “What’s goin’ on?”

Lucy fumbles as she puts her earpiece back in her ear and finagles her boots on. “Medusa here,” she says.

“Medusa,” Glenn says, “we’ve got a problem. There weren’t any survivors in Summergrove, but we found another group on the road.”

“We’ve got ’em surrounded,” Eliot says, “but they’re drivin’ an armored truck and they’re carryin’ heavy artillery.”

“Crap,” Lucy says with soft vehemence before she asks, “where?”

“We’re ’bout a mile out from the fortress,” Eliot informs her, “down the highway.”

“Okay,” Lucy says as she slings her backpack over her shoulders, “hold your fire unless they shoot first. We’ll be right there.”

* * *

_Monday, 6 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 512._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_Highway 34._

* * *

Lucy catches sight of the armored truck before Daryl grinds to a halt and parks his bike in the middle of the highway. There are four people in the vehicle: a brawny redhead with a moustache that doubles as a throwback to Yosemite Sam from classic _Looney Tunes_ in the driver’s seat, a Mexican girl dressed in shorts and a crop top packing a SIG-Sauer P228 9mm pistol that she aims at Lucy as she hobbles over, a chubby white guy with a mullet holding a M4A1 assault rifle that he clearly has no idea how to shoot, and an absurdly tall Pacific Northwest redneck decked out in army fatigues who looks strangely familiar.

Maggie grins at her, showing her teeth as she aims her Colt rifle at the M939 series five-ton truck. “You have sex hair,” she observes.

Lucy shrugs as she takes her goggles off. “I just had great sex,” she deadpans, “so that makes perfect sense…” she fizzles out at the sight of the redneck from the Pacific Northwest and holds up one hand before she orders, “…stand down. I know him.”

“You what?” Glenn asks.

Lucy tilts her head back and smiles up at the blast from her past. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound, “since we were twelve years old.”

“Hey,” the Pacific Northwest redneck says and lowers his assault rifle as he smiles back at her. “Lucy, is that you?”

Lucy flicks her gaze to the girl packing the SIG-Sauer and nods. “Hi, Liam,” she says, “long time no see.”


	15. Lies

**This place will be a living thing.**  
**It is not made for you,**  
**but made by you.**  
**It is made up of you.**  
**It is the blood of the long way home.**

Lisa Marie Basile, “Trionfo Della Morte”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 15**  
Lies

* * *

_Monday, 6 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 512._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_Highway 34_.

* * *

Rosita Espinosa has been on the road for almost thirteen months now, and with the detours they’ve had to take to avoid the hordes they’ve gone more than a thousand miles. Their convoy had originally consisted of eleven other people, but that number inevitably dwindled as the detours got more frequent and they got stuck in limbo waiting for Eugene to map out new routes to Washington. Rosita has a niggling feeling they’re on a wild-goose chase of a misiones suicida, but she figures that following Abraham to the end of the world is her best chance at survival—if they do eventually make it to D. C. and save the world, that would just be la guinda.

These people who surrounded them after they had to take a detour from Route 27 onto Highway 34 aren’t the only group of survivors they’ve encountered on the road, but they’re the first who seem to have their shit together: their clothes are clean and they’re not patchwork or worn through with holes, their skin and hair doesn’t have several days or weeks or months’ worth of grit and dust caked in, and they’re communicating over localized two-way radio frequencies.

Rosita doesn’t let her aim waver as she looks at the people surrounding Abe’s truck. There’s an Asian guy that carries himself like he’s shrugged off years of low self-esteem aiming a shotgun at Abe; an Asian girl with cat’s eye glasses in full body armor; another Asian girl wearing a ginormous cable knit sweater over a pair of leggings with a face so pretty she could probably cause a traffic accident even in the apocalypse; the guy who shot a hole in their gas tank who’s built like a brick shithouse and wearing a plaid button-down shirt on top of a pair of jeans with his long brown hair pulled back away from his face whose body language screams ex-military; the slim blonde dressed all in black with hazel eyes who shot out their rear tires; a brunette with green eyes decked out in tactical gear and aiming a semiautomatic at Liam; and a bespectacled white guy wearing a jacket with duct tape stuck to his sleeves who looks even geekier than Eugene.

When their leader arrives, she thinks it’s the guy on the bike until he kills the engine and the girl on the back rises to her feet. Rosita doesn’t think she’s anything special—she’s chubby and mousy with retro square-framed glasses teetering on top of her button nose and frizzy brown hair in a thick messy braid—but she effortlessly cuts through the tension in the air as she hobbles into the line of fire, the knee-length skirt of her black vintage dress a widening gyre around her legs. There are three guns holstered to the belt around her waist: two .38 Specials and a .22 caliber pistol.

Rosita narrows her eyes at the scars on her arms: a thin one that starts on the back of her right hand and stops in the middle of her forearm that looks like the echoes of surgical incisions and four chomping semicircles of scar tissue eerily shaped like teeth. _It looks like she was bit_ , she thinks, _but that’s not possible. Nobody who gets bitten survives_.

* * *

Liam jumps down out of the back of the armored truck and scoops Lucy up into a bear hug—he’s six-foot-four and he towers over everyone else, especially her. Daryl gets all squirrelly until she extricates herself from the behemoth and smiles at him over her shoulder while the others surrounding the vehicle stand down. Parker crouches to assess the damage Eliot did to their gas tank and watches the fuel drip onto the roadway.

“Kate’s alive,” Lucy informs Liam before she turns back to Daryl and smiles wider in the incongruous way that doesn’t show her teeth. “Daryl,” she says, “this is Liam Driscoll—Kate’s husband. Liam, this is Daryl Dixon—my husband.”

Liam arches his eyebrows at that, since the Lucy he remembers was extra virgin and terminally single for nine years. “You take his name?” he asks.

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound triumphantly, “no more bad popcorn jokes.”

Liam grins at her. Orville wasn’t the best last name to have, in a school full of cruel and creative bullies: they called her butterface all through junior high. Liam had been stuck on the same bus route with her, and he used to knock the heads of the bullies who bothered her together like coconuts. After he found out that her ex-boyfriend had raped her, he offered to run him the fuck over with his pickup truck. Kate had a string of terrible or mediocre boyfriends in high school, and marrying Liam was her way of graduating from having bad taste in men. “There are still a lot of jokes that can be made out of Lucy,” he points out. “Lucy Goosey, Lucy Caboosey, that dirty song about the steamboat—”

“Stop,” Lucy groans and ekes the word out into two indignant syllables, “or I’m going to start calling you Billy the Hillbilly again, _William_.”

Abraham climbs out of the driver’s seat and slams the heavy door of the M939 in his wake to get their attention. “Liam,” he says, “do I need to remind you of the special nature of the mission we’re on? This shit is time-sensitive and we’re already way behind schedule. So,” he huffs, “as your sergeant I’m ordering you to turn your ass around and get back in the truck.”

“Fuck no,” Liam retorts, “my wife’s alive. I’m not going anywhere.”

Lucy sighs as Daryl aims a bolt at the sergeant because he stepped into her personal space. “Okay,” she cuts in sharply before the brawny redhead has a chance to get another word in, “first things first: your military rank ceased to matter right around the time the undead started to outnumber the living. This is my territory and that means you’re in my world now. I’m sure you and your girlfriend…” she flicks her gaze to Rosita, “…could do a lot damage if you try to shoot your way out of this instead of just talking things through like civilized people, but your friend with the mullet has no idea how to use that gun he’s packing and your gas tank is leaking all over my highway. I think it’s safe to say you’re not going anywhere without our help, since we’ve stripped every abandoned car within a hundred-mile radius for parts and scrapped the frames to repurpose the metal. Why don’t you spend the night at our fortress and regroup in the morning?”

Abraham whirls on her in time to see Daryl slip his finger onto the trigger of his crossbow, a silent warning. “We can’t waste any time, alright?” he tells her with a huff of exasperation. “Believe it or not, the fate of the entire damn human race might depend on it.”

Lucy narrows her eyes at him behind her glasses. “What?” she asks.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Glenn asks while he and his sisters move to back Daryl up. Maggie keeps her gun on Rosita, unwavering.

It doesn’t go unnoticed by Eugene or Abraham or Rosita, the way these people fall in line to protect their leader. There’s more to this girl than meets the eye, something that makes them all willing to take a bullet for her or kill to keep her safe. Abraham squares his shoulders and stares down at her. “I’m Sergeant Abraham Ford,” he says, “and these are my companions: Rosita Espinosa and Dr. Eugene Porter. We’re on a mission to get Eugene to Washington, D. C. because Eugene’s a scientist and he knows exactly what caused this fucking mess.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and narrows her eyes at the alleged scientist behind her glasses. “Okay,” she says. “What caused it?”

“It’s classified,” Eugene mumbles before he looks down at Abraham. “We do need a new vehicle,” he points out in a maladroit Texas oil-slicked drawl. “We should go with ’em. Trust me. I’m smarter than you.”

Liam sighs. “Eugene’s been talking to some bigwigs in Washington on his satellite phone,” he says, “but nobody’s been picking up for a few weeks now.”

Lucy frowns at that, her whole face scrunching in confusion. If a government satellite is still up and running, Alec would’ve detected that by now—one of the first things he did after they set up their wi-fi at the fortress was modify a program he designed to find out whether or not some branch of the American government was still digitally operational. Alec Hardison, who hacked the Pentagon servers as a tween and didn’t get caught, wouldn’t’ve missed even the most undetectable and top-secret of satellites. There’s no way he would’ve missed the outgoing signal from a satellite phone. Eliot and Parker exchange a loaded glance before they both turn and look at Lucy, who ducks her head discreetly to confirm they’re all thinking the same thing. Whoever this Eugene guy is, his story is shady as fuck.

Alec choose that opportune moment to come in over the radio. “Medusa,” he says urgently, “Horde Rho incoming. ETA in five minutes.”

“Shit,” Lucy mutters under her breath. Horde Rho is a migratory swarm of zombies from Alabama with twenty thousand walking dead, give or take a few hundred. “Pit crew,” she says as she taps her earpiece to send out an alert, “incoming. Fire up the crematorium. Pun intended,” she grins and giggles to herself before she adds, “Sasha, come in for a code 10-72.”

Sasha actually rolls her eyes far enough for Lucy to hear it from the other end of the frequency. “Tara and I never should’ve taught you all the fire codes,” she says, but Lucy can hear the smile in her voice and that smile is contagious.

“We’re ten minutes out,” Tara adds. “We might not make it before the horde does.”

Lucy tucks her cane in the crook of her elbow and looks at the hitter over her shoulder. “Eliot,” she says, “cooler.”

Eliot nods and unzips his duffle bag. There’s a mini-cooler inside, along with a first-aid kit. It’s become standard procedure for them to bring a few units of blood out into the field in case anyone gets bitten or scratched during a sweep.

Lucy extracts a bag of her blood from the cooler and turns back to Daryl before she takes his hunting knife out of the sheath on his belt. Abraham watches her hobble in front of the M939 and slice open the blood bag to drizzle the ichor across the road in a haphazard line of gore. “What the hell is she doing?” he asks.

“Making sure the horde won’t get anywhere near us before the cavalry arrives,” Milton says matter-of-factly.

Eugene watches her squeeze the dregs of blood out of the IV bag with a frown on his plump face. “How is a blood bag gonna stop a zombie horde?” he wants to know.

“Same way I survived four zombie bites,” Lucy informs him. “I’m immune to the zombie virus and my blood is toxic to the undead even in trace amounts. When the horde gets a whiff of this,” she flails her hand at the blood barrier on the roadway, “they won’t even try to get past it.”

There are shipping containers on either side of the road, so the horde won’t be able to just go around it either. Lucy unzips her backpack and puts the IV bag devoid of blood in her garbage bag while all four of the newcomers stare at her in the throes of suspending their disbelief.

Eugene narrows his eyes at her as she shifts the bulk of her weight onto her cane. “How’re you immune?” he asks. “Were you part of some top-secret government experiment conducted before the disease went global or something of that nature?”

Lucy rolls her eyes because of course he would jump right to conspiracy theories. “Nope,” she says and pops the _p_ sound. “I’ve always had a preternaturally strong immune system, to the point that my joints were eroded by inflammatory erythrocyte sediment before I started taking immunosuppressants. When I was immunocompromised, I used to get sick about once a week and I was immunocompromised for nine years. If a viral infection was going to kill me, I would’ve died a long fucking time ago.”

Daryl slings his crossbow over his shoulder with a bolt still nocked and puts an arm around her waist, letting her lean on him so her ankle won’t hurt as much later. It’s almost second nature these days. “Ya’ almost died of the flu the other week,” he points out.

Lucy tucks herself under his sinewy arm as the horde approaches. Daryl is warm despite the creeping November chill, and she can smell the lingering scent of sex on him: sweat and musk and woods. “Okay,” she concedes, “but I survived. I always do.”

“You guys set up the roadblocks that detoured us here,” Rosita deduces as she hops out of the back of the truck, “didn’t you?”

Gert side-eyes the guns holstered on her hips. “We did,” she confirms, “Jacqui—who used to work at the Office of Zoning and Development in Atlanta—designed a system to bring the zombies to our doors.”

“What?” Abraham asks incredulously, “why the hell would you want to bring the dead things to you?”

Parker folds her arms loosely across her chest and stares him down. “We have a crematorium,” she explains, “and driving for miles to mow down the hordes only to haul a bunch of rotten corpses back to our crematorium is a pain in the ass.”

“How do you guys mow down the hordes?” Rosita wants to know.

Lucy gesticulates to the barrier she made. “With ichor,” she says, “diluted blood from someone with immunity. Sasha—who’s bringing the cavalry—was a firefighter pre-apocalypse…” she grins as the horde of zombies grinds to a halt at the end of the bloodline and start yowling to express their impotent viral rage, “…and her team hoses the hordes down. We use a 1:100 solution of blood to water and a firetruck can hold a thousand gallons. It kills—or re-kills—them instantaneously.”

“We’ve also aerosolized the ichor solution,” Milton adds, “for use out in the field.”

Rosita cocks her head and smirks, impressed. “Like zombie mace,” she says. “Where can we get some of that?”

Lucy extracts a spray can from her purse and holds it out to her. Rosita keeps her right hand on the grip of her pistol while she grabs the spray can with her other hand and maces one of the zombies right in the kisser. Lucy bites her bottom lip to stifle a smile. _This might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship_ , she thinks.


	16. High and Dry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1) T. Brooks Ellis was never the director of the Human Genome Project. Francis C. Collins was, before the project was completed. Alan E. Guttmacher succeeded him as the acting director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2008.
> 
> (2) Abraham shares a surname with Nate from _Leverage_ , so they’re cousins now. I don’t make the rules.

**My zombies will never take over the world because I need the humans—the humans are the ones I dislike the most, and they’re where the trouble really lies.**

George A. Romero

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 16**  
High and Dry

* * *

_Tuesday, 6 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 512._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon;_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility_.

* * *

Sasha doesn’t waste any time hosing down the horde, and then comes the dirty work of transporting and incinerating over twenty thousand bodies. If any of the newcomers were skeptical about Lucy being immune even after the demonstration with the aerosolized ichor, they’re all believers now. Watching a massive horde of the undead get mowed down by a firefighter wielding a flood of pink water is enough of a miracle that it makes them all see the light. Metaphorically speaking, anyway. Literally speaking, Liam can’t see much of anything because Kate hopped out of the firetruck and climbed her husband like a tree while the others extinguished the horde.

Lucy and Daryl ride up the road to the fortress ahead of the big rig containing the newcomers, who look gobsmacked by the slew of solar panels and rows of greenhouses surrounded by shipping containers. It’s been seven months since they arrived at the prison, six months since they won the war with Woodbury at the dwindling end of spring and spent the summer remaking their little corner of the world. Acrylic panes of glass lit from within glow and refract in the dull sunshine that filters down through the clouds. Henwen the dairy cow is grazing with the calves, who aren’t quite fully grown yet. Pigs cluster around troughs of water and feed in one half-acre. Sheep pastured in another half-acre bleat as they drive by. Tupping season is almost over, so a few of the ewes are still heavy and pregnant while others have already given birth to newborn lambs in the shelters they constructed out of wood and sheet metal.

Abraham looks up and narrows his eyes at one of the people in the tower by the inner gate. “Nate,” he says, “is that you?”

Nate sighs. “Abe,” he says and tries not to look too unhappy to see the burly man with the horseshoe moustache. “It’s been a long time.”

“How do you two know each other?” Sophie asks him with a lilt of intrigue in her voice.

Nate scowls more to himself than at her. “We’re cousins,” he says.

“Small world,” Daryl mutters.

Lucy splays one hand over his shoulder for balance and uses her cane to get off his bike and back on her feet. “Kate and I vouch for Liam,” she informs the mastermind, “and he’s vouching for them. If you know anything that I should know—”

“No,” Nate tells her, “my family history is just…complicated.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods. Nate’s a chessmaster—they’ve played dozens of games in the past six months and she’s only beaten him a handful of times. Lucy has been playing chess for twenty-five years and she’s a formidable opponent, but she’s pretty sure that she only won against him because of sheer dumb luck. Nate is also an honest man, and he respects her from the other side of the chessboard because he respects her as a leader—he wouldn’t lie to her and put their people in danger to protect his secrets after everything they’ve been through. Lucy exhales a soft whoosh of air as she takes her goggles off. “Okay,” she murmurs and taps her earpiece to turn it back on. “I’m calling a meeting of the council in the library in half an hour,” she says, “be there or get left out of the loop.”

* * *

After she takes a quick shower, changes out of the clothes she wore on the sweep, and puts in a load of laundry that had been piling up, Lucy makes herself a grilled cheese sandwich and steak fries in the cafeteria. One of the perks of living in a place with its own a cafeteria is that she has access to a fryer. It’s so much better than wrapping frozen steak fries in tinfoil and baking them in the oven, even if eating fried food tends to upset her stomach.

Daryl goes to look for a replacement gas tank and rear tires for that brokedown five-ton truck in the machine workshop even though he has a hunch the newcomers won’t be going off into the wild blue yonder anytime soon. Kate gives them a brief walking tour of the fortress in the meantime, letting her husband slink an arm around her waist and hook his thumb into the belt loop of her worn jeans with the rhinestones on the back pockets.

Abraham whistles long and low at the sight of their armory, the bullet press and other sundry reloading supplies cluttering up the surface of a patchwork line of workbenches against one wall. “I’m downright tickled y’all found each other,” he says, “you should spend the rest of the night celebrating, because there’s absolutely no reason why we don’t stuff ourselves in a rig and head on up to Washington tomorrow.”

“I’d say we’re fifty-five percent of the way from Houston to Washington,” Eugene murmurs, “we had an armored military vehicle for transport up ’til now and we still lost eight people.”

Rosita clenches her jaw and swallows around the lump in her throat. “Yeah,” she says, “but that wasn’t our fault.”

“They’re gone,” Abraham says gruffly, “we’re not. There’s still a world that needs saving.”

Kate unlocks the door to the hallway that connects the cell blocks to the main complex. “Lucy wants to save the world too,” she says, “she’s been researching the zombie virus for over a year trying to find a cure.”

“How close is she?” Rosita asks as Eugene swallows thickly and looks down at the floor to hide the guilty expression on his face.

Kate shrugs. “Daryl’s immune now because of her,” she says, “and so are a few other people. Lucy calls it synthetic immunity because they’re replicating her immunoresponse to the virus, but it’s not part of their genetic code like hers is.”

“How does she know it’s genetic?” Eugene asks.

Kate glances at the heart in a jar on the circulation desk as they walk into the library where the rest of the council is waiting. There are forty-nine people who live in the fortress, and twelve of them are on the council: Kate, Cath, Nico, Daryl, Michonne, Andrea, Glenn, Maggie, Sasha, Alice, Carol, and Morgan. Daryl is sitting next to Lucy, one of his sinewy arms draped over the back of her chair. Caleb isn’t on the council, but Lucy asked him to sit in because the newcomers might have questions about the research they’re conducting. “Lucy’s father was immune,” Kate explains.

Abraham doesn’t miss the past tense. “What happened to him?” he wants to know.

Lucy adjusts her glasses and clears her throat to get their attention before she answers the question. “I shot him in the face,” she says.

“I’m guessing he deserved it,” Rosita deduces.

Lucy ducks her head and nods, a sharp descent of her chin. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound, “he did.”

“So,” Abraham says to break the silence that ensues, “you think we could get a few tanks of that ichor shit to go? We could use it on the road to Washington.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and stares at Eugene, who’s avoiding eye contact. Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since Lucy is too autistic to make eye contact with perfect strangers most of the time. Maybe he’s on the spectrum too. Still, she can’t shake the feeling that he’s shady as fuck. Lucy gnaws on her left thumbnail without biting through it before she speaks. “I’m not giving you shit until you tell me why you’re going to D. C.,” she says bluntly.

“It’s classified,” Eugene tells her. “There’s a cure, but even if I told you—even if I provided step-by-step instructions complete with illustrations and a well-composed F. A. Q. and I went red ring—the cure would probably still die with me.”

Lucy narrows her eyes at him behind her glasses. Eugene isn’t the first man to insult her intelligence to her face, but she’s not in the mood to let him get away with that. Lucy is used to guys thinking they’re the smartest person in the room, but guys like that are never smarter than she is. “Okay,” she bites out, “let me put this in terms you can understand: you’re up shit creek without a paddle here. There are no spare vehicles or replacement parts for your truck within a hundred miles that aren’t mine and the only thing you have to trade is knowledge. I’ve been a certified genius since I was fifteen and I have an IQ of 183, so quit condescending to me and either tell me what you think you know or get the hell out of my library.”

Eugene squares his shoulders, but he still can’t seem to meet her eyes. “I was part of a ten-person team at the Human Genome Project trying to weaponize diseases to fight weaponized diseases,” he tells her, “pathogenic microorganisms with pathogenic microorganisms. Fire with fire. Interdepartmental drinks were had. Relationships made. Information shared. I am keenly aware of the details behind failsafe delivery systems designed to kill every living person on this planet. I believe with a little tweaking on the terminals in D. C. we can flip the script, take out every last dead one of ’em. Fire with fire,” he pauses and one corner of his mouth quirks up before he adds, “all things being equal, it does sound pretty badass.”

Lucy makes a soft noise in the back of her throat. “When exactly were you made aware of those failsafe delivery systems?” she asks.

“Two years ago, ma’am,” Eugene informs her. “Just a few months before the Human Zombification Virus went global.”

Lucy flicks her gaze to Caleb before she turns back to the steaming pile of bullshit Eugene dropped on her desk. “Odd,” she murmurs, “since the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003.”

“There’s no way you got your doctorate or your research accreditation in time to work on the project and get such a high level security clearance,” Caleb says flatly, “unless you’re a hell of a lot older than you look or you went to college before you hit puberty.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly as Eugene hunches his shoulders in a futile attempt to shrivel up. “It would’ve been a more believable lie if you said you were working at the National Human Genome Research Institute or involved with the Human Microbiome Project and those failsafe delivery systems you mentioned were meant to disperse a bioweapon,” she deadpans, “you didn’t even bother to come up with a believable steaming pile of bullshit. Dr. Subramanian,” she says and points to the Desi man with one finger, “is a geneticist whose research into the modification of oncolytic viruses as a cancer treatment was cutting edge pre-apocalypse. When we’re done cloning the immunity gene to cure the zombie virus, he’s going to find a cure for cancer.”

“Which,” Caleb chimes in with a caustic smile, “means you’re been using my field of study for your bullshit.”

Liam frowns as comprehension dawns with a furrow in between his eyebrows. “You lied,” he says. “You’re not a scientist.”

“Eugene is a scientist,” Rosita insists, her voice pitching higher in distress. “I’ve seen the things that he can do—”

“I just…know things,” Eugene mumbles, suddenly at a loss for articulation.

“You just…know things?” Glenn asks him incredulously.

Eugene nods stiffly. “I know I’m smarter than most people,” he says. “I know I’m a very good liar, and I know that I need to get to Washington. I do believe that locale holds the strongest possibility for survival, and I want to survive. I reasoned that if I could lie and cheat some people into taking me there, I’d be doing them a solid too considering the perilous state of the city of Houston…” he with an audible gulp before he adds, “…the state of everything.”

“People died trying to get you this far,” Rosita bites out and she chocks back the sting of her tears as Abraham stares down at his hands and snarls his fingers into fists.

Eugene nods again. “I’m aware of that,” he says as the words get caught on the lump of guilt pressurizing in his throat. “Stephanie, Warren, Pam, Dirk, Rex, Josiah, Roger, and Josephine. I lost my nerve as we grew closer, for I am a coward and the reality of getting to our destination and disclosing the truth of the matter became some truly frightening shit. I took it upon myself to slow our roll,” he clarifies, “find time to finesse so that when we got to Washington…but now I’m screwed no matter where we go from here. I also lied about T. Brooks Ellis—the director of the Human Genome Project—liking my hair,” he says and looks at Rosita for a fraction of a second before he ducks his head and looks away. “I do not know T. Brooks Ellis, but I did read one of his books and he seemed like the type of guy that wouldn’t blink twice at a Tennessee Top Hat…” he slants his gaze to Abraham and murmurs, “…again, I am smarter than you.”

Lucy yawns as Abraham punches Eugene in the face over and over until the other man topples over, knocked out cold. It takes Liam, Daryl, and Eliot to hold him back and put him in a chokehold until he calms down. _I think the fact that it took me less than a minute to tear his story to shreds unequivocally proves that he’s not smarter than I am_ , she thinks with a dash of petulance.  _I can’t blame him for being self-aware enough to acknowledge his physical limitations and using his brain to survive, but I can blame him for insulting my intelligence and trying to bullshit me. I’m an academic and I was a TA for two years in grad school. I can smell bullshit like that from light-years away_. “Okay,” she says and ekes the _oh_ sound out into a soft _ooh_ , “you’re welcome to stay as long as you like and take some time to get all the toxic masculinity and curse your sudden but inevitable betrayals out of your systems. If you want to hear about my plans for using my immunity to save what’s left of the human race, come and find me downstairs in the cafeteria. I have promises to keep, and I’m going to bake my friend a batch of chocolate chip cookies before I sleep.”

* * *

Lucy has time to crack a few eggs on the plastic rim of a mixing bowl and check the glaire for shell fragments before the newcomers find her in the cafeteria kitchen with albumen sticking viscous to her fingertips.

It’s only Rosita with Abraham still looking surly behind her, since Eugene is still out cold and Liam is making up for lost time with Kate by taking a tour of the greenhouses where she does her botanical thing. After a year or more of being led in a merry dance by a liar who seemed to think of himself as the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind, they both need answers. It’s lucky that one of their many detours led them to the only leading expert on the zombie virus in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Lucy turns and looks over her shoulder at them as Abraham folds his arms tight across the barrel of his chest and Rosita hops to sit on the edge of the stainless-steel countertop behind her. “I’m going to need samples of your blood and cerebrospinal fluid,” she informs them, “everyone who survived the airborne strain of the zombie virus that caused the global outbreak is infected with the latent waterborne strain. I know you came here from Houston, so the latent virus in your systems might be mutating in a way that I haven’t seen before due to variant environmental factors. I’d also like to scan your brains to see if the acute infection has caused any damage to your central nervous systems. I won’t make you undergo any medical testing without your consent, but I would like to know if you’re infected with a mutated strain of the virus sooner rather than later.”

“You’re saying everyone’s infected,” Rosita deduces.

Lucy mixes butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla in with the eggs and hums, her soft _mm-hmm_ drowned out by the whir of the mixer. “I’m sure you remember the first two weeks of the outbreak,” she murmurs, “people spontaneously amplifying in the street because the virus was spreading like wildfire. Those infected with the latent waterborne strain of the zombie virus are immune to the live airborne strain, but most people were immune to the waterborne strain and that’s why 99.99% of the global population died.”

“How do you know so much about this?” Abraham wants to know.

Lucy dumps the dry ingredients into the bowl and mixes the dough again before she answers his question. “I went to C. D. C. headquarters in Atlanta two months after the world ended,” she informs him. “I wasn’t the leader back then, but we were all hoping to find the answers that Eugene told you he had. What we found instead was a scientist named Dr. Edwin Jenner, who gave me a hard drive containing the research the W. H. O. was doing on the zombie virus before communications went dark.”

“Eugene wasn’t talking to anyone in Washington,” Rosita murmurs, “he lied about that, too.”

Lucy shrugs. “Probably,” she says matter-of-factly as she separates the dough into smaller bowls to add in things like almond extract and orange zest. “I’ve got one of the best hackers in the world here and he’s been running a program to detect telecommunications and see if anyone is using satellite radio frequencies. There’s no way your friend could’ve used a satellite phone without us picking up the signal.”

“What kinds of signals’ve you picked up?” Abraham wants to know.

Lucy rolls the dough into balls with a dusting of brown sugar and drops them on a cookie sheet, resisting the urge to lick the clumps sticking to her palms. “There’s a group in Atlanta called Terminus broadcasting a message on a constant loop about their sanctuary,” she informs him, “my husband tuned into their frequency by accident two weeks ago before Alec set up our communications hub. We’ve been avoiding their base of operations because of an influenza epidemic and because I have a hunch they massacred a group of people we met in the city last year and their sanctuary is actually a ‘catch more flies with honey than vinegar’ trap. I’m too jaded to think a place that’s being advertised as a ‘sanctuary for all, community for all’ is anything but a con. We haven’t detected any satellite activity. Yet.”

Rosita tilts her head to one side, the gold hoops in her ears swaying like a gilded meniscus. “What would we do,” she asks, “if we stayed here?”

Lucy shrugs again. “There’s a lot of shit to do around here,” she informs her, “my job mostly consists of medical research and pitching in whenever or wherever I’m physically capable. I spend a lot of time at a desk making lists and doing inventory and overthinking tactical plans. There are fifty-three people here, including you. I delegate to a council of twelve, who in turn delegate to the people who help out with survivalisms like scavenging, agriculture, textiles, infrastructure, engineering…” she pauses to slip one cookie sheet into the oven before she flops into the swivel chair she uses to scoot around while she cooks and continues, “…if you have any ideas for other things we should be doing, let me know. I can’t think of everything. I’m also not in the habit of giving newcomers any kind of specialized job until I know what they can do. Which is something you should talk to my friend Cath about if you want to settle here, since management and human resources are her jam.”

“Your friend Kate said you made your husband immune,” Abraham says bluntly. “If you’ve got a cure for this disease, why in the hell aren’t you mass-producing that shit?”

Lucy adjusts her glasses as she tries and fails not to flush bright red. “I didn’t mean to,” she mumbles, “six months of repeated exposure to the antibodies that I secrete from my mucosa made Daryl immune. It’s technically a cure, but sexually transmitted immunity takes months and my story isn’t being written by Laurell K. Hamilton. I’m not going to save the world by having all of the orgies. I’m going to do it with _science_.”

“How?” Rosita asks, the curiosity in her voice insulating a glimmer of hope. What she’s talking about is the post-apocalyptic equivalent of the holy grail, and she’s not asking them to take her at her word. There’s flesh and blood proof, from the bite scars on her arms to the ichor in her veins. What she’s doing here could remake the world.

Lucy smiles at her in the incongruous way she has that doesn’t show her teeth. “I’m going to sequence my genome and find the locus of the immunity gene,” she says. “Dr. Subramanian is going to help me clone it and find the right plasmid to splice it into other people to rewrite their genetic codes so they can replicate my immunoresponse to both strains of the zombie virus and pass immunity onto the next generation. I want my immunity to outlive me.”

Famous last words.


	17. Mixed Emotions

**I never saw a wild thing**  
**sorry for itself.**

D.H. Lawrence, “Self-Pity”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 17**  
Mixed Emotions

* * *

_Sunday, 12 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 517._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

Liam folds himself into an armchair in the counselling office that he set up for anyone interested in individual or group therapy in one corner of the brick and mortar administration building. Which puts him with his back to the window, sitting across the room from the couch Lucy flops onto and shuts her eyes behind her glasses to block out the sun.

“It’s weird,” she murmurs as the harsh daylight tries to sneak in through her closed eyelids. “I know you joined the army so you could get a free college education and eventually become a psychiatrist, but I never thought you’d be shrinking my head.”

Liam shrugs. “It was your idea,” he points out, “you’re the one who said everyone in the post-apocalyptic wasteland needs their heads shrunk.”

“I know,” Lucy mumbles. “It’s still pretty weird.”

Liam makes a noise in agreement, a shrink-wrapped _uh-huh_. It’s his first one-on-one counselling session, and he’s still trying to get the hang of this whole psychiatry thing. “I saw you and Neeley lighting a candle in C block this morning,” he says. “When I asked Kate about it, she told me that you started a tradition of blowing out candles to make wishes for people who died on their birthdays.”

“Yup,” Lucy tells him softly. “If our dad was alive, he would’ve been sixty-four today.”

Liam flicks his gaze to the pair of Freudian slippers that she gave him, displayed prominently on the bookshelf occupying the wall next to the couch. “I see,” he says before he asks, “how do you feel about that?”

* * *

_Tuesday, 14 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 519._  
_Carrollton, GA;_  
_Route 27._

* * *

After yet another week of sweeps and scavenging, Lucy finds herself in the passenger seat of a rig while a blonde teenager drives northwest up Route 27 to Carrollton. It’s quiet on the road, the eerie desolation of the wasteland outside whizzing by the passenger side window to vanish in the rearview mirrors. Beth didn’t have a chance to trade in her learner’s permit for a real driver’s license before the world went to hell in a handbasket, but she can operate a moving vehicle better than someone with chronic pain and a wrist that doesn’t bend.

“I need a drink,” Beth mutters under her breath.

Lucy hunches over to grab the plastic jug of ice water on the floor by her feet, droplets of condensation slipping over her fingers as she grips the handle.

“No.” Beth shakes her head slowly, keeping her eyes on the road in front of them. “I mean a real drink—as in alcohol. I’ve never had one ’cause of my dad, but he’s not exactly around anymore, so…”

Lucy unclenches her fist around the handle of the jug and slumps back in her seat as Beth fizzles out into silence with something mournful lingering in the corners of her mouth. Hershel died weeks ago, but this is the first time she’s left the fortress since Zach was injured on the supply run to Big Lots. If she wants to grab a drink on impulse and indulge in postmortem teenage rebellion, it’s better that she does it with adult supervision. _I was fourteen when I had my first “real” drink_ , Lucy thinks, _and Beth turned eighteen back in August. There’s no legal drinking age in the zombie apocalypse, anyway_. “Okay,” she says as she glances down at the digital map on the screen of her tablet and taps the pad of her index finger on top of the town to zoom in, “take the next right.”

“Beth,” Maggie says on the radio from the back of the rig as her sister takes a sharp turn, “what are you doing?”

Lucy muffles a yawn in the hollow of her palm and taps her earpiece. “We’re going on a side quest,” she says to everyone on the other end of the frequency. “Medusa out.”

* * *

_Tuesday, 14 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 519._  
_Carrollton, GA;_  
_Pine Vista Country Club._

* * *

Pine Vista Country Club overlooks a dead field, whorls of withered grass and unfettered weeds. Conifers grow at the edges of the golf course, their needles green and thriving in contrast to the deciduous trees and their fallen colorful leaves. There’s a plant growing wild in front of the sign, obscuring the letter _P_ in _Pine Vista_. Greek columns bite down over the entrance like the teeth of a guard dog, Cerberus at the gates of the underworld.

Beth parks in front of the dilapidated clubhouse and frowns skeptically at the door as Maggie emerges from the back of the big rig in her tactical gear. Daryl slings his crossbow over his shoulder as Lucy opens the door and puts his hands on her waist to help her clamber out of the passenger seat without aggravating her inflamed ankle on impact with the driveway, the sage green floral print fabric of her dress smooth under his calloused palms. It’s a study in contrast on such an incongruously warm day in the preludes to winter: Beth in a billowy sleeveless blouse on top of a frilly camisole and faded blue jeans, Maggie in armor on top of jeans and a t-shirt she stole from Glenn that morning, Lucy in a vintage dress with matte black shank buttons from collar to hem on top of her leggings and combat boots, and Daryl in his biker vest on top of a sleeveless black undershirt and dark jeans. Maggie is the only person in danger from the zombies in the wilderness of the post-apocalyptic wasteland, the only prey they can sniff out.

Lucy shifts the bulk of her weight onto her cane as Daryl squints at the clubhouse, scrutinizing the corroded newspapers plastered over the windowpanes. There were people holed up here at some point, in the early days of the outbreak. Question is, are they still around?

“What’s going on?” Maggie asks her sister as the zombies in the woods yowl their clarion call for flesh and blood. “What’re we doing here?”

Beth scuffs one foot on top of the pavement and makes a nasal noncommittal noise. “I need a drink,” she mutters before she turns and looks at Lucy to ask, “golfers like to booze it up, right?”

Maggie narrows her eyes at her sister. “Beth,” she says, “our daddy was an alcoholic. You shouldn’t be messing around with anything harder than Lucy’s pink lemonade.”

Beth shakes her head and sighs. “I’m sure you think I’m being stupid,” she murmurs, “and maybe I am, but I don’t _care_. All I’ve wanted to do ever since our daddy died was lay down and cry, but we don’t get to do that. So that means we might as well do something, and I’m doing this.”

“It’s better if she goes through whatever stage of her grieving process this is while we’re watching her back,” Lucy points out. “Beth having one drink under the supervision of three sober adults isn’t going to kill her, despite the genetic risk factors that predispose her to alcoholism.”

Maggie huffs. “Fine,” she grits out tersely. “Come on. There might be people inside.”

Lucy hobbles up the weathered brick path lined by round, overgrown hedges that remind her of a Chia Pet army. Daryl crouches to check the pockets of the corpse rotting on the steps for a set of keys while Beth tries to open the door and Lucy extracts a set of lockpicks that Parker gave her last Christmas from her backpack.

“We’ve got company,” Maggie says and nods at a mini-horde of thirteen zombies shambling past the ninth hole.

Lucy smiles more to herself than anyone else as the lock clicks open and puts the picks away. It’s cluttered inside the clubhouse, ropes strung up haphazardly with sheets hanging over them like drapes to create the illusion of privacy and piles of dirty laundry on the floor. Daryl shines the beam of his flashlight on the corpses suspended from the ceiling: the zombie who died in a designer suit gnashing his teeth as the women dangling on either side of him claw at the stale air. Lucy cocks her head and narrows her eyes behind her glasses at them as the stench of decay creeps into her nose and bile rises in the back of her throat. There’s no balcony they could’ve stepped over above them, no toppled chairs or tables underneath them—nothing they might’ve been standing on before they broke their necks. “These weren’t suicides,” she deduces, “someone did this to them.”

“You think whoever killed them is still here somewhere?” Maggie asks as Daryl crouches down and rummages through a leather bag full of cash and gold jewelry.

Lucy shakes her head slowly and tries not to stare as stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills are spilling out of the designer handbag in ten thousand-dollar bundles. It’s over a hundred thousand in cash, enough to pay off her student loans plus interest twice over. _Jeepers_ , she thinks. “I doubt it,” she says out loud as she extracts a handheld lantern from her backpack and flips the switch to illuminate the bulb inside, “zombies decay approximately forty-six times more slowly than a disinfected corpse does. These zombies are in the beginning of the ‘bloat’—” she loops the lantern around her wrist and crooks her fingers like quotation marks around the word, “—stage of decomposition. It reeks to high heaven in here because their bodies are slowly expelling a buildup of hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and methane gas through their skin, and a froth of natural fluid and liquefied tissues from their orifices. Which is something that nobody wants to smell.”

Daryl slings the handbag full of loot back over his shoulder and rises to his feet in one deft slice of motion, a hunter among the ruins of a civilization where he never felt at home. “So,” he says gruffly, “you think whoever killed these people cleared out instead of just gettin’ rid of the bodies? Why in the hell would they do that?”

Lucy shrugs, one-shouldered. “I don’t know,” she informs him. “Maybe they worked here and some of the rich people who brought hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to a zombie apocalypse expected them to keep acting like servers. I sure as shit wouldn’t have wanted to live at the assisted living facility where I used to waitress and wash dishes, and I didn’t have to deal with rich assholes while I was on the clock.”

“I thought your family was rich,” Maggie says as they sweep the room and make their way down the hall to the kitchen.

Lucy makes a rueful noise that starts in her throat and shakes loose through her nose. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound as Daryl squints at her over his shoulder in the incandescent light of her lantern, “but my parents didn’t have bundles of cash. Their assets were all sunk into residential properties: the house in Poulsbo, the condo in Petaluma. When my dad was eligible for his pension, they were going to flip the house and retire…” she gnaws on the inside of her cheek and draws her machete as Beth opens the kitchen door, “…only they never got the chance because the world went to hell in a handbasket.”

Daryl stares at her as she shuffles down the hallway past the kitchen, tracking her with his eyes. _I should’ve known_ , he thinks. Lucy is persnickety in ways that only someone who grew up rich could’ve been, and she had gotten the kind of education that was only accessible to people with money pre-apocalypse. “It’s funny,” he mutters, “you never told me your family was rich.”

Lucy turns and tugs her bottom lip in between her teeth before she forces herself to meet his gaze. “I never told you that my family had money because you think you’re not good enough for me,” she adjusts her glasses and cocks her head to showcase the stubborn curve of her chin, “and I didn’t want to make you feel insecure over something that doesn’t even matter.”

“It does matter,” Daryl retorts and grits his teeth around the words, “you’re always sayin’ that lyin’ by omission is still a lie, and I thought we didn’t lie t’ each other.”

Lucy sighs and scrapes her fingers over the nape of her neck, her nails too blunt to scratch her skin. “I love you,” she says with soft vehemence. “It doesn’t matter to me that you didn’t finish high school, or that you didn’t go to college, or that you didn’t have any career aspirations beyond not being a drug dealer anymore once Merle’s debt was paid. I never cared about that, but I know you do. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

Daryl swallows hard as something raw and ugly lurches deep in his gut. “Well,” he says, “too bad, ’cause you did.”

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek hard enough to make it hurt before she hobbles past him, back out into the dimly lit room where the zombies are hanging from the ceiling and yowling at the zombies lurking outside. Daryl has never looked at her that way before, like she broke some fragile part of him that he didn’t know she could shatter.

“You’re an asshole,” Maggie tells him.

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Yeah,” he mutters. “I know. Let’s just get Beth her damn drink and get the hell outta here.”


	18. Back of My Hand

**You do not have to be good.**  
**You do not have to walk on your knees**  
**for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.**  
**You only have to let the soft animal of your body**  
**love what it loves.**  
**Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.**  
**Meanwhile the world goes on.**

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 18**  
Back of My Hand

* * *

_Tuesday, 14 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 519._  
_Carrollton, GA;_  
_Pine Vista Country Club._

* * *

Beth stops in the giftshop to fill a bag with ugly polo shirts, delicate sweaters, and khakis with stiff pleats. Maggie helps her dismantle a mannequin topped with the torso a mutilated corpse of a woman, stripped down to her bra and branded with a sign condemning her as a _Rich Bitch_.

Daryl pops a stick of true cinnamon into his mouth and sucks, hollowing his cheeks out instead of biting down; he hasn’t had a cigarette since Lucy asked him to quit smoking, but he still has a lingering oral fixation.

 _When my mom and her three sisters were younger_ , she’d told him in the aftermath of the bullshit armistice they negotiated with the Governor at the mill, _my grandparents used to smoke all the time. It was the fifties, so nobody knew how bad cigarettes were for you. When I was twelve, she was diagnosed with bladder cancer and her oncologist said exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke from an early age predisposed her to developing urothelial carcinomas—but she went through four cycles of chemo and she survived. There are no oncologists in the zombie apocalypse that we know of. Please quit smoking, Daryl. I don’t want to watch you get sick and die_.

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. What she meant by that was, _I love you_. Daryl has known her long enough to read between the lines. Lucy, who never says anything she doesn’t mean, has told him that she loves him thousands of times. Those weren’t always the words she used, but he heard her loud and clear.

 _It ain’t all about her_ , Daryl thinks while he chews petulantly on his cinnamon stick, _never was._ _It’s about me and my shit. I ain’t good enough to be loved by her. I have no idea what the hell she even sees in me_.

There’s a grandfather clock in the hallway with a gilded face. When it chimes, the sound of taking its toll resonates like a roil of thunder and zombies rise up from the bowels of the clubhouse. Daryl shoots two of the shamblers with his crossbow before he drops the bow and picks up a golf club that he uses to bash in the skulls of the rest. When he fights, the rage coiled up inside him seeps out until all he feels is empty. Maggie and Beth watch him beat the stuffing out of one zombie in silence, the splatter of decayed gray and white matter on the carpet the only sound in the giftshop.

“Got that out of your system?” Maggie asks him as she bags the unused fire extinguisher.

Daryl nods brusquely. It takes every ounce of his self-control not to run outside to where he knows Lucy is, because he has a hunch that he made her cry and he doesn’t want to prove himself right. “Yeah,” he mutters.

“Good,” Maggie says and squeezes his shoulder before she turns on her heels and follows her sister out into the hall.

Daryl lingers in the giftshop to fill a canvas tote bag with unstruck matches and other useful stuff before he follows them to the bar and grill and throws a handful of darts at the pictures of rich assholes on the wall, thuds punctuating the search for an unopened or unbroken bottle of booze. When he swipes all of the paper cocktail umbrellas, Beth arches her eyebrows at him. Daryl unclenches his fist and puts the umbrellas in the front pocket of the designer handbag full of cash. “Lucy collects ’em,” he says gruffly before he asks, “you found your drink yet?”

“No, but I found this.” Beth holds up the bottle of clear liquid in her hand to show him.

Daryl snorts as he reads the label and shakes his head. “No way,” he says as she turns and looks at Maggie, “ain’t gonna let your first real drink be no damn peach schnapps. C’mon.”

* * *

_Tuesday, 14 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 519._  
_Carrollton, GA;_  
_Ole Hickory Trail._

* * *

Daryl punches an address into the geolocation tablet and goes to put his haul in the back of the rig before Maggie drives up Ole Hickory Trail and past Little Tallapoosa River into the forest. Lucy is tucked into a back corner with her earbuds in, drowning the rest of the world out while music leaks into the negative space around her. It’s a slow and heavy song, he can hear that much.

“It’s not my job to fix you,” she murmurs without opening her eyes. “There’s nothing I can do or say to change how you feel about yourself. I’m done trying to tell you that you’re good enough. It’s your job from now on to learn how to believe that. I’m also sorry for not telling you the whole truth about my family. I grew up with parents who taught me that money should be earned, and that having money didn’t make us better than anyone else. I never thought badly or worse of you because you’re a redneck or because you didn’t have money. I just didn’t want to hurt you—”

Daryl crouches in front of her as the music in her ears stops and cups her face in his hands. It takes everything in him to open his mouth and use his words instead of kissing her, because words are what she needs. “I’m sorry too,” he tells her, “for bein’ an asshole and takin’ my shit out on you. I shouldn’t have done that.”

Lucy exhales a soft whoosh of air as she takes her earbuds out. “I’m more upset by what you didn’t say,” she mumbles without looking at him. “I told you that I love you and you didn’t say it back.”

Daryl hunches over her with his hands on her face, the heels of his palms calloused and rough against her plump cheeks. Sometimes he forgets how bone-deep her insecurities are, how bad her luck with love was before she was his. “I love you,” he says in the softest voice she’s ever heard come out of his mouth, “and I ain’t gonna stop feelin’ how I feel about you just ’cause we got in a fight.”

When he kisses her, he takes it slow until she tangles her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck and kisses him back with such a brutal sweetness that he almost comes undone. Daryl breaks the kiss to nuzzle his nose along her jaw and buries his face in the crook of her neck. Lucy untangles her fingers in his hair to hook an arm around his waist and hold him with her hand splayed over the stitches in the feathers of his tattered wings.

Daryl nuzzles the soft hyperbola where her shoulder melts into her neck and pulls back to look at her. “I dunno what the hell ya’ see in me,” he says as he strokes her cheek with the rough pad of his thumb.

“Milton asked me what I saw in you once,” Lucy informs him. “I told him that I see a future with you, better and brighter than what came before. I see everything I never thought I would be lucky enough to have,” she kisses the hollow of his palm before she clarifies, “you’re everything to me. I just wish that you would love yourself half as much as I do.”

Daryl frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing. “Milton was thinkin’ I ain’t smart enough for ya’,” he deduces.

Maggie chooses that opportune moment to open the hatch of the rig and groans at the sight of them tangled up in each other. “Please tell me you’re not about to have makeup sex right now,” she says.

Lucy winces at the influx of light and shakes her head slowly. “Nope,” she says and pops the _p_ sound. “Beth is going to get a drink, and then we’re going to rendezvous with the others because I changed the plans for today. I’m done avoiding the city,” she adjusts her glasses before she adds, “we’re going to Georgia Tech and we’re going to get that genetic sequencer or die trying.”

* * *

_Tuesday, 14 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 519._  
_Carrollton, GA;_  
_The Crap Shack._

* * *

Daryl brings them to a dirt road near the convergence of Buck Creek and Little Tallapoosa River. Sunlight filters down on them through the obvoluted tree branches and dried leaves crumble underneath their feet. Daryl splays one of his hands over the arch of her spine as Lucy glares at a gnarled root, like the foliage is out to trip her.

“How about a motorcycle mechanic?” Beth asks to break the silence punctuated only by the crunch of twigs and dead growth.

Daryl squints at her over his shoulder. “Huh?” he grunts.

“That’s my guess for what you were doing before the turn,” Beth says before she asks, “did Zach ever guess that one?”

Daryl clenches his jaw and Lucy tilts her head to look up at him as he digs his fingers into the soft flesh at the small of her back. “It don’t matter,” he grits out, “hasn’t mattered for a long time.”

“It’s just what people talk about,” Maggie says. “It helps them feel normal.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Yeah,” he mutters, “well. That never felt normal t’ me.”

Lucy makes a noise that sounds like _gah!_ as she trips on a root and uses her cane to avoid toppling over. Maggie tugs her lower lip in between her teeth in a futile attempt to hide her laughter. Beth watches her with a worried look in her wide blue eyes.

Daryl snorts, one corner of his mouth unfurling into a crooked smile. If anyone had asked who he thought he’d end up marrying, he never would’ve imagined a mobility-impaired vegetarian who chases the shadows away by snoring like a freight train and drooling on his chest every night. “See,” he drawls, “this is why I never take ya’ huntin’ with me: ’cause ya’ can’t walk in the woods.”

Lucy rolls her eyes at him. “I can’t walk anywhere,” she points out, “being in the wilderness just makes me seem even more impaired than usual because most places aren’t a minefield of roots and whatnot.”

Daryl smiles at her with a soft twitch of his lips and hunches to plant a kiss on her forehead before he stops in front of a ramshackle house with a tarp on the roof and a yard overgrown with towering weeds. Lucy stops by the back porch and stares at the alligator ilium on top of the wooden railing, the fishing poles and rods propped up against the wall by the backdoor. There’s an animal pelt on the seat of a wooden chair, the skin of a dead possum that probably got eaten for dinner.

“What is this place?” Maggie asks as the hunter looks in the windows to check for revenants.

Daryl slings his crossbow over his shoulder before he opens the door of the shed and grabs a crate full of bottles and jars off a shelf, brewing up a cloud of dust in his wake. “It was my Uncle Jess’ house,” he tells her, “me and Merle used t’ spend our summers out here. We’d go fishin’ while our dad got drunk off his ass…” he offers the crate to Beth and says, “…he’s the one who gave me that crossbow.”

Beth adjusts the strap of the Horton Scout HD 125 across her back and takes the crate from him. “What’s this?” she asks.

Daryl goes to unlock the backdoor and holds it open for Lucy, anxiety rooted taut in the line of his shoulders. “It’s moonshine,” he says, “white lightnin’. C’mon.”

 _Shithole_ is the only word that comes to mind to describe the inside of the house. There’s broken glass on the floor, remnants of the shattered windowpanes scattered into a sea of unfettered garbage. Candles with the wicks burned down sit on the kitchen table and occupy the surface of a desk against the wall, pale wax ghosts surrounded by peeling wallpaper. Dishes with a microcosm of mold on them are piled up all over the kitchen: in the sink, on the counter, on top of the wood-burning stove. Towels are strewn among crumpled up pages from newspapers and pages of coupons. Chairs with seats made out of yellow vinyl sit cracked open. It reminds Lucy of the mess she accumulated in her apartment during her depression spirals, the clutter that created a feedback loop of self-loathing and made her feel worse. Maggie goes to check the bedroom for squatters or stragglers while Beth drops the crate on top of the kitchen table.

Daryl gets a clean plastic cup from one of the cabinets and pours the blonde a drink from one of the mason jars of white liquor while Lucy folds herself into one of the empty vinyl seats. It’s surreal for him to see her in this place, the bright reality of her a stark contrast to his memories of the distant and dismal past. “Alright,” he says gruffly. “That’s a real first drink right there.”

Beth stares at the moonshine in front of her with a wary expression on her face.

Daryl squints at her, scrutinizing. “What’s the matter?” he asks.

“Nothing,” Beth says. “It’s just…our daddy always said bad moonshine can make you go blind.”

Maggie picks up another jar from the crate and takes a sip with an encouraging smile.

Beth follows her lead and scrunches up her whole face in distaste as the liquor burns down her throat. “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted,” she declares before she takes another sip. “Second round’s better.”

Maggie puts the mason jar back in the crate and gulps down the water in her canteen. “Slow down,” she says, “and drink lots of water or there’ll be hell to pay in the morning.”

“See,” Daryl murmurs as Lucy muffles a yawn in the hollow of her palm and wrinkles her nose at the smell of mold invading her nostrils, “ya’ don’t belong in a place like this.”

Lucy adjusts her glasses and looks him in the eyes, unflinching and unashamed. “I’ve seen worse,” she informs him, “and this isn’t where you belong. It’s just where you came from.”

Daryl swallows hard as warmth unfurls in his chest. _I know where I belong_ , he thinks. _I belong wherever she is_.

Beth glances over her shoulder and catches sight of something pink in her periphery. “We’ve all gotta start somewhere,” she says and picks up the ashtray shaped like a bra full of cigarette butts with an incredulous arch of her eyebrows. “Who’d go into a store and walk out with this?” she asks.

“My dad,” Daryl says, “that’s who. Oh, he was a dumbass—he’d set those up on top of the TV set and use ’em as target practice.”

Maggie narrows her eyes at the hunter. “Wait,” she says, “your dad used to shoot things inside your house?”

“It was just a bunch’a junk anyway,” Daryl mutters as he sits in the chair next to Lucy and bumps his knee into hers. “I grew up in a place just like this. You got your dumpster chair,” he says and points to an old armchair that his uncle had found by the side of the road on trash day. “That’s for sittin’ in your drawers all summer, drinkin’. You got your fancy buckets. Those’re for spittin’ chaw in, after your old lady tells ya’ t’ quit smokin’. You got your …” he gestures to the newspapers strewn all over the floor, “…your internet.”

Beth flops back on top of a pile of blankets and sighs. “I get why our daddy stopped drinking,” she says.

“You feel sick?” Maggie asks.

Beth shakes her head slowly. “Nope,” she says. “I wish I could feel like this all the time. That’s bad.”

“Okay,” Maggie says and tosses her sister a bottle of water before she turns back to Daryl. “I’ve got one: prison guard. Were you a prison guard before?”

Daryl snorts. “No,” he says and hunches over in his chair with his elbows on his knees. “Merle had this dealer,” he says, “this janky little white guy—a tweaker. One weekend we were over at his house watchin’ TV. Wasn’t even noon yet and we were all wasted. Merle was high, we were watchin’ this show and he was talkin’ shit about it. Wouldn’t let up…” he shakes his head and makes a rueful sound in the back of his throat, “…Merle never could.”

Lucy sucks in a sharp breath at the memory of blood on her hands, tepid and viscous. _Merle was a piece of shit_ , she thinks matter-of-factly, _good fucking riddance_.

Daryl slumps back in his chair and shrugs in a futile attempt to shake off the bad memories. “Anyhow,” he says, “turns out it was the tweaker’s kid’s favorite show and he never got to see his kid. So he felt guilty about it or somethin’. So he punches Merle in the face. So I started hittin’ the tweaker as hard as I can, then he pulls a gun—” he points two fingers at the side of his head, “—sticks it right here and says ‘I’m gonna kill you, bitch.’ So then Merle pulls his gun on him, everyone’s yellin’, I’m yellin’…” he reaches out to take Lucy’s hand in both of his and plays with her fingers to keep himself calm, “…I thought I was dead. Over a dumb cartoon about a talkin’ dog.”

“How’d you get out of it?” Beth asks, her blue eyes wide.

Daryl shrugs. “Jesse—the tweaker—punched me in the gut,” he says, “I puked, they both started laughin’ and forgot all about it,” he slants his gaze to Maggie and exhales a quiet gust of air before he asks, “ya’ wanna know what I was before all this?”

Lucy ducks her head to nuzzle his bare shoulder. Daryl brings her hand to his lips and kisses her knuckles, softly. Lucy knows this story, but it’s nice to see Daryl open up and be vulnerable with other people; he means everything to her, but they can’t _be_ everything for each other.

Daryl swallows thickly. “I was just driftin’ around with Merle,” he says, “doin’ whatever he said we were gonna be doin’ that day. I was nobody…nothin’. I was just some redneck asshole with an even bigger asshole for a brother.”

“You miss him,” Maggie says without much inflection. Merle is a sore subject for her because of everything that happened in Woodbury, but she knows how terribly it hurts to lose a sibling under any circumstances.

Daryl nods brusquely. “Yeah,” he mutters, “even though I know I shouldn’t.”

“I miss my mom,” Beth says wistfully, “and Susie, and Rachel, and Shawn…he was so overprotective…and Daddy. I hoped he would just live the rest of his life in peace, you know?” she turns and smiles at her sister. “I thought you and Glenn would have a baby, and he’d get to be a grandpa, and we’d have birthdays and holidays and summer picnics, and he’d get really old. It’d just happen. It’d be quiet. It’d be okay. Daddy would die, and he’d be surrounded by people he loved.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “That’s how it was,” she says. “I didn’t like Hershel at first, but we all loved him in the end and I like to think he loved us too.”

Maggie gulps and chokes back the sting of her tears. “Yeah,” she says in a hush, “he did.”

Beth sighs. “I wish I could just change,” she says and looks at Daryl, “like you did. It’s like you were made for how things are now.”

“I’m just used t’ things bein’ ugly,” Daryl murmurs, “growin’ up in a place like this.”

Beth shakes her head slowly. “You got away from this place,” she says. “You and Lucy found each other. You’ve just gotta stay who you are, not who you were. You’ve gotta put places like this away. You have to, or it kills you. We…” she rises up and grins as she knocks over the mason jar of moonshine. “We should burn it down.”

“No,” Lucy says flatly. “We’re not doing that.”

Beth pouts. “Why not?” she asks.

“No amount of catharsis is worth starting a fire in this forest and fucking up the ecosystem,” Lucy says and keeps holding onto Daryl’s hand as she uses her cane to get back on her feet. “We should go.”

Maggie chugs more water from her canteen to chase the remnants of the white liquor out of her system. “I’ll drive,” she says.


	19. Terrifying

**This is the secret: mostly our mutations are hidden under skin.**  
**On the outside, robust and rosy as a milkmaid; inside, not entirely stable.**  
**Errors in replication—beyond our control—and yet sometimes the systemic destruction**  
**of a certain cell might lead to a breakthrough, a land mass not yet discovered inside us,**  
**clever adaptations that let us survive genetic drift in cases of plague or flood,**  
**carriers of one disease not susceptible to another, heme content falling or rising**  
**according to the prevalent virus. Yes, the one-eyed kitten, that six-legged Chernobyl calf,**  
**but more often…me, the girl with heritable deficiencies and tendencies.**

Jeannine Hall Gailey, “Introduction to Mutagenesis”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 19**  
Terrifying

* * *

_Tuesday, 14 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 519._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Georgia Institute of Technology;_  
_Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience._

* * *

Georgia Tech is located in Midtown, a huge suburban campus that occupies four hundred acres. Their bioengineering institute has an Illumina HiSeq 2500 System, a cutting edge genetic sequencer that weighs four hundred and eighty-eight pounds and comes with an uninterruptible power supply. It’s late afternoon by the time the zombies on campus are extinguished and they break into the research lab where the genetic sequencer lives. Alec inspects the instruments and components inside the machine while Nico salvages the computer that controls the system.

Lucy sweeps the dust off with one hand and strokes the sleek casing of the machine with her fingertips. _I found it_ , she thinks, _finally. This is how I’m going to save the world_.

“Should we give you and the sequencer a minute alone, sweetheart?” Eliot asks her with his grin audible in his voice.

Lucy shuts her eyes. “Shh,” she intones, “we’re having a _moment_.”

“We’re gonna lose the light in half an hour,” Daryl says gruffly. “We should get movin’. Somethin’ here don’t feel right.”

Lucy opens her eyes and smiles at him in the shy way she has that always makes his heart stutter deep in his chest. “It’s going to take twenty-seven hours to sequence my genome,” she informs him, “fifty-four more hours to sequence the samples from Blake and Rick, and eighty-one hours for three control group samples. I’m going to have all the data I need to find the locus of the immunity gene by the end of the week.”

“We’ve already scavenged all of the other equipment you need to start cloning the gene,” Alec interjects, “thermocyclers, mass spectrometers, cytometers, electrophoresis devices, phosphorimagers, RNA isolators, extractors, software for bioimaging and blot analysis…”

Daryl squints at the hacker and shakes his head. “I got none of that,” he mutters.

“It’s all technical jargon,” Lucy informs him in the phlegmatic voice she uses to avoid infodumping at the speed of light, “a thermocycler amplifies segments of DNA using the polymerase chain reaction to generate thousands or even millions of copies of a particular genetic sequence and cytometers measure the characteristics of a cell. After we clone the immunity gene, we’re going to make cell cultures and splice the gene into blood and tissue samples from people who aren’t immune to see if they mutate or reject the gene. Our time-lapse cytometer is how we’re going to monitor the progress of the experiment before we splice the immunity gene into human test subjects using irreversible electroporation. Since the zombie virus only affects humans, we can’t do animal testing before we experiment on people and we don’t have the technology or resources for embryonic testing, so…”

Daryl smiles at her, one corner of his mouth unfurling softly. It’s been too long since he’s seen her so excited about her research—so brilliant and full of light. _Still the prettiest damn thing I ever saw_ , he thinks, _ain’t never seen anyone who shines like she does_.

“We’re still raiding the healthcare center for medical supplies,” Glenn says on the radio, “the zombies on campus must’ve kept people from looting the facility sooner. We found enough antibiotics to get through another outbreak of the superflu and then some.”

Lucy bites her lip and hums in the back of her throat. “What about the dining halls?” she asks.

“It’s like a mold palooza in the food court,” Parker tells her. “We found some canned food and stuff like that, plus the snacks and drinks in the vending machines.”

Lucy muffles a yawn in the hollow of her palm as the other scavenging teams report their discoveries to her on the radio and watches Daryl, Eliot, Anton, T-Dog, Abraham, and Tyreese lift the sequencer onto a rolling cargo carrier and wheel the machine out of the research lab, taking it painstakingly slow. There are no survivors on campus, just thousands of the walking dead.

“Beth and I are taking another detour,” Maggie chimes in, “she wants to see—”

Lucy stops at the sound of a crash on the other end of the frequency, the ricochet of gunshots and an abrupt grinding squeal of rubber tires on asphalt loud enough to make her wince and snarl her fingers into her hair.  _What fresh hell is this?_ she thinks.

“Beth!” Maggie screams as the Cadillac that crashed into her sister peels off into the sunset.

Lucy tucks her cane in the crook of her elbow and runs so hard it feels like her tits are going to fall off and the pavement underneath her is pulverizing her feet, but she’s too late—by the time she finds Maggie out of breath and wheezing on her knees in the middle of the road, Beth is gone.

* * *

_Tuesday, 14 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 519._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

Daryl does his best to follow the Cadillac that hit Beth while the others fan out and scour the surrounding area until it gets too dark for them to track down the monsters who kidnapped her. Lucy orders her people to make a tactical retreat back to the fortress, because they can’t do anything in the dead of night. After they unload the sequencer and supplies they found, she calls a meeting in the library to plan a rescue mission. Milton, Caleb, Rosita—who worked as a medical assistant at a free clinic pre-apocalypse—and Amy are downstairs in the infirmary setting up the sequencer to start mapping Lucy’s genome. Rick, Liam, Kate, Morgan, Abraham, Sasha, Tyreese, Karen, Andrea, Luisa, Alisha, and T-Dog are on watch in the guard towers while Nate, Sophie, and Parker monitor the camera feeds in the control room. Neeley, who worked in the kitchen at a fancy restaurant while he was in college, is down in the cafeteria with Carol, Dulcie, Eliot, Cath, and Toby cooking dinner for everyone. Alec tries to triangulate Beth’s location using her radio, but it’s not broadcasting a signal; either it’s broken or it’s turned off, and they don’t have the technology to turn it back on remotely.

“Beth wanted to see the dorms,” Maggie says. “Those people came out of nowhere. They just…” she exhales in a huff and her nostrils flare with impotent rage. “They just ran her down and took her.”

“They were cops,” Tara adds, “one of them had a gold stripe insignia on her uniform. That makes her a lieutenant.”

“Okay,” Lucy says and taps the digital map of Atlanta on the screen of her tablet, “the cops who kidnapped Beth couldn’t’ve taken her too far. There was no trail for Daryl to follow, meaning they must’ve taken her somewhere close by—probably within a five-mile radius of the main campus. Alec, can we reconfigure the scanner you programmed to detect satellite radio frequencies to pick up the C-band signals cops would’ve used to communicate pre-apocalypse?”

Alec frowns. “I can,” he says, “but we might not be able to pick up those signals from where we’re at. C-band radio frequencies are transmitted using terrestrial satellites. They’re localized in a way that geosynchronous satellites aren’t. Which is why police officers had patrol zones pre-apocalypse: a police radio doesn’t have enough bandwidth to broadcast outside of a certain square mile radius.”

“Atlanta is approximately a hundred and thirty-four square miles,” Jacqui says. “Atlanta PD had jurisdiction over six zones pre-apocalypse. Georgia Tech was in Zone 5.”

Alec nods. “Terminus is broadcasting a VHF radio signal from Mechanicsville in Zone 3,” he says. “It’s within that five-mile radius.”

“Okay,” Lucy says and ekes the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_ as she yawns, “tomorrow at first light we’re going to see if Beth was taken to Terminus and scan those zones for C-band radio frequencies. Tara, you were a student at the Atlanta PD training academy pre-apocalypse. I want you to compile a list of places where those cops might’ve set up a stronghold within that five-mile radius in case Terminus isn’t their base of operations and we’re dealing with another group of survivors that we didn’t know about until now.”

Glenn frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing into wrinkles of worry. “We should go back now,” he says. “I know it’s dark, but—”

“Nah,” Daryl says gruffly and shakes his head, “but nothin’. Most of the hordes in the city ain’t migratory ’cause they’ve been eatin’ strays and scavengers for months instead of shufflin’ off t’ look for more people t’ feed on. Those zombies’re fresher ’n the ones we’re used t’ dealin’ with. Beth’s immune, and she’s got a better shot at survivin’ a night in that city than anyone who ain’t.”

Glenn frowns exponentially harder. “I’d agree with you if she didn’t get kidnapped,” he says, “but she’s not alone in the city, she’s with a bunch of cops who crashed into her with their car.”

“They could be torturing Beth for information,” Maggie grits out, “like Blake and Merle tortured me and Glenn.”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood. “I started a war,” she murmurs. “I overheard Blake torturing you, and I started a war that ended with the deaths of fifty-nine people. I’d like to avoid repeating that portion of our post-apocalyptic history.”

“You let Amy go looking for Andrea,” Maggie points out, “and Daryl went looking for Merle—”

Lucy adjusts her glasses and silences her with her most withering stare. “How many people died because I went ahead with that plan?” she retorts. “You killed two people, one of whom was a nineteen-year-old girl. Glenn was beaten half to death and exposed to the zombie virus. Oscar was shot. Daryl was captured and he could’ve died in that gladiator ring. You’re scared for Beth. I get that because I’m scared for her too. You’re still not going anywhere until I say otherwise.”

Maggie shuts her eyes and exhales a shuddering breath. Glenn puts an arm around her shoulders and sighs. “Beth is just a kid,” he says, “we were supposed to keep her safe.”

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek again until it hurts. Daryl puts his hand on her knee under the circulation desk and strokes his thumb back and forth over the thick skin on top of the knob of bone, a sweep of slow friction that somehow quiets the internal screaming of her anxiety in her head. Lucy exhales a hiss of dead air through her teeth in a futile attempt to decompress. “I know,” she says.

“Hey,” Nico interjects to shatter the heavy silence that ensues, “remember when Sophia and Lucy and Jacqui were all lost in the woods and I suggested that we find a bunch of GPS trackers and implant them in our arms in case something like that ever happened again, but everyone told me that I was being ridiculous?”

Lucy claps both hands over her mouth to muffle a helpless guffaw in the hollows of her palms, her shoulders quaking with laughter as she hunches over her in her seat and wheezes uncontrollably. “Oh,” she intones in a voice that shakes loose from her throat in trembles, “my god. Too soon, Nico. Too soon.”

“Hey,” Nico echoes and holds up her hands in mock surrender, “I’m just saying. I told you so.”

Maggie tugs her bottom lip in between her teeth before she cracks a smile. It’s better to laugh than burst into tears, after all. “We still have those microchips?” she asks.

Daryl shakes his head. “No way,” he growls. “I ain’t gonna let nobody chip me like I’m a damn stray dog. No.”

Lucy takes his hand in both of hers so they’re palm to palm and puts her head on his shoulder, nuzzling her cheek against his upper arm until his spine goes from taut as a bowstring to loose and unstrung. _Something is rotten in the state of Georgia_ , she thinks as some of the palpable tension in the room melts away. _I have a bad feeling about this. It feels like the worst is yet to come_.


	20. Following the River

**You asked me once, _What are we made of?_**  
**Well, these are the things we’re made of.**  
**One house, two house. The road goes away from here.**

Richard Siken, “The Stag and the Quiver”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XI**  
_We Find Ourselves_  
**Chapter 20**  
Following the River

* * *

_Wednesday, 15 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 520._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

Carl finds Michonne on watch in one of the guard towers. Andre is sitting on the floor and building a colorful plastic turret out of oversized Duplo bricks. Michonne turns and looks over her shoulder at Carl before she looks back out at the woods outside of the shipping containers for any sign of unseen enemies.

“We went to a refugee camp,” she says in a hush. “Alec, Parker, Andre, me and my boyfriend Mike—that was his father—and our friend Terry. It just got worse and worse at the camp. People were leaving. People were giving up, but I didn’t. I was coming back from a run. I saw the fences were down. I heard the moans. It was over. Mike and Terry were high when the zombies got in,” she swallows thickly before she whispers, “and they were bit. I could’ve stopped it—could’ve killed them—but I let them turn. I cut their arms off so they couldn’t scratch, cut their jaws off so they couldn’t bite. I tied chains around their necks. It was insane. It was _sick_. It felt like what I deserved, dragging them around so that I would always know. I found out that they kept me safe, hid me from the zombies so they didn’t see me anymore. I was just another monster. I was gone for a long time, but then Andrea brought me back. I woke up in the infirmary and saw that my brother was alive, that my son was alive. Lucy saved them and brought me back. Your dad brought me back. You did, too. I see how you’ve been looking at your dad. You don’t have to be afraid of me, or him.”

Carl ducks his head to hide his face under the brim of his sheriff’s hat. “It’s not that,” he murmurs, “he told me the other day that he was proud of me—that I was a good man—but I’m not. I know more now about what he wanted from me and I tried, but I’m not what he thinks I am. I’m just another monster, too.”

* * *

_Wednesday, 15 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 520._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Slaughterhouse of Terminus,_  
_Formerly Known as Collier Metals._

* * *

Atlanta was originally a settlement named Terminus. It was founded in 1837 by the engineers who built the railroad and their families and incorporated as the city of Atlanta in 1847. Whoever set up shop in the railway car repair station that was converted into a metal warehousing and transloading facility pre-apocalypse knew their history.

 _Terminus is also the Roman god of boundaries and delineating borders_ , Lucy thinks as Daryl grinds to a halt and parks his bike at the intersection of the train tracks and Fortress Avenue, _sometimes depicted as one aspect of Jupiter. Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote in his Romaiki Archeologia that by decree of Numa Pompilius, anyone who destroyed the boundary stones dedicated to Jupiter Terminalis could be killed with impunity for the crime of being sacrilegious. I have a bad feeling that we’re about to cross the line_.

“Okay,” she says out loud, “Terminus has a broadcasting system. Which,” she holds up her earpiece in between her thumb and forefingers, “means they might be able to pick up our communications. We’re going in radio silent to make sure they won’t hear or see us coming. Alpha team is going to be me, Daryl, Rick, Glenn, Bob, and Sasha. We’re going to sneak in while Beta, Gamma, and Delta team each take strike positions around the station in case this goes south.”

Daryl nods brusquely. “When and if that happens,” he says as he tucks a .38 special revolver in the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, “aim for the propane tank in the yard and light ’em up. We ain’t takin’ no prisoners today.”

“We didn’t pick up any camera feeds,” Alec informs them. “According to Eliot, their security consists of thirty guards posted outside the fence and twelve guards posted on the rooftops of the buildings inside the fence.”

Lucy frowns at that. “We left two dozen people on watch at the fortress,” she murmurs, “their security force outnumbers us almost two to one.”

“Horde Omicron’ll even them odds,” Daryl says gruffly. “It’s a couple thousand at least.”

“You don’t think anti-tank weapons are overkill?” Glenn asks.

Lucy shrugs, one-shouldered. “I think it’s just enough kill,” she quips, “but let’s hope we don’t have to use them.”

* * *

Terminus consists of four buildings surrounded by a chain link fence with a few shipping containers scattered around, a garden with towering sunflowers, and a wafting smell of meat cooking in the crisp air. Lucy gulps and swallows her nausea in a futile attempt to stop her stomach from churning and squelching. Daryl splays his warm palm over the hollow in between her shoulder blades and rubs her back while Rick holds the portable RDF system and pinpoints the location of the perpetual radio broadcast.

Lucy makes a mental note to get Alec to launch a picosatellite with infrared thermography capabilities into low earth orbit so they can find out exactly how many survivors are left on the planet in two hours or less, because going in blind while confronting other communities is too stressful. If anyone can figure out a way to fit a microcomputer that can process thermograms and beam them back to earth into a ten-centimeter cube and launch that cube into the atmosphere, it’s Alec Hardison.

“These people could be perfectly nice,” Glenn says while he cuts a hole in the chain link fence and peels it back. “Beth could be having barbecue for lunch and we could all be home by dinnertime.”

Daryl scoffs. “Yeah,” he mutters, “and pigs might fly. Ain’t no way it’s that simple. Never is.”

“These people don’t go out looking for other survivors,” Lucy says as ducks through the hole in the fence and tries not to inhale the stench of meat cooking, “that could just mean they don’t want to risk the people they already have. Which,” she glances down at the scars on her arms, “tells me none of them are immune. Or that if any of them are, they don’t know how to use it.”

Rick makes a noise in the back of his throat, a quiet _uh-huh_. “I’m immune,” he murmurs as he tucks the handheld RDF system in his bag and draws his Colt out of its holster, “but I wouldn’t have been able to do what you’ve done. I’ve never met anyone who thinks the way you do.”

“Terminus,” the woman sitting in front of the broadcasting apparatus drones as they sneak into a building hewn out of old weathered red bricks through the emergency exit. “Those who arrive survive. Follow the tracks to where all lines intersect. There are maps at the crossings to help guide you on your journey.”

Lucy stops at the other end of the hallway made of fireproof white bricks made to withstand extreme heat and looks at the giant map of the city hanging from a metal scaffold. There are half a dozen people in the room standing by metal tables on wheels festooned with art supplies and draped with old maps, the cartography marred by railway lines marked in ink that all intersect in Atlanta. _It’s an expansion_ , she thinks, _they’re casting a wider net to lure in more people using the train tracks and they need more propaganda maps for that_.

“Sanctuary for all. Community for all. Terminus,” the woman drones on. “Those who arrive survive. Sanctuary for all. Community for all—”

Lucy clears her throat and steps into the room, walking so her cane makes a hollow sound against the floor. “Hello,” she says and ekes the _oh_ sound out awkwardly.

“Well,” a thin man with sharp features sighs as he puts his paintbrush down and huffs, “I bet Albert is on perimeter watch.”

Lucy flicks her gaze to Daryl, who’s standing to her right with his finger on the trigger of his crossbow. Whoever this man is, he’s trying to lull them into a false sense of security by lying about how many people they’ve got on perimeter watch. One of the mapmakers surreptitiously walks out of the room, ostensibly to check in with their security force. _It could be totally innocuous_ , Lucy thinks, _but maybe not. I still have a bad feeling about this_.

“You here to rob us?” the thin man asks warily.

Daryl shakes his head. “No,” he says gruffly, “we wanted t’ see ya’ before ya’ saw us.”

“Okay,” the thin man says and smiles at Lucy in a way that seems disarming but sends a surge of alarm buzzing down her spine as he shrugs and steps out from behind one of the cartography tables, “makes sense. Usually we do this where the tracks meet,” he clarifies and opens his arms in a show of hospitality. “Welcome to Terminus. I’m Gareth,” he says and gestures to the people behind him before he adds, “that’s Summer, Joseph, Anissa, and Bill.”

Lucy adjusts her glasses and stares at the maps hanging from the ceiling. Daryl squints at the people lurking behind the cartography tables, scrutinizing them so they’ll know who’s the hunter and who’s the prey. Glenn narrows his eyes at the man who left the room while he walks back to his desk. Sasha doesn’t let her aim waver and points her customized AR-15 at Gareth, using the scope to pinpoint a spot in the middle of his forehead. Bob shoves his hands in his pockets and glances at her over his shoulder. Rick keeps his Colt drawn in one hand, but he doesn’t aim at anyone. Yet. Lucy slants her gaze to Gareth and gnaws on the inside of her cheek as anxiety brews in the bottomless pit of her stomach. “I’m Lucy,” she says and flails one hand at the people around her, “that’s Daryl, Rick, Glenn, Bob, and Sasha.”

“You’re nervous. I get it. We were all the same way,” Gareth says and his voice echoes into the negative space of the cavernous room while he walks toward where they stand. “We came here for sanctuary,” he clarifies and grinds to a halt in front of Lucy, “that what you’re here for?”

Lucy tilts her chin and forces herself to look him in the eyes. “No,” she informs him. “We lost a friend of ours two days ago. Someone drove up and snatched her during a sweep of Georgia Tech. I doubt you took her since your modus operandi is obviously letting people come to you,” she says as she flails the hand she isn’t using to grip her cane at their propaganda maps to illustrate her point, “but I thought maybe she might have ended up here.”

“What’s her name?” Gareth wants to know.

“Beth,” Daryl says, “she’s blonde, about yea high—” he looks down at Lucy and holds up the hand he isn’t using to grip his crossbow a few inches above her head, “—kinda scrawny, likes t’ sing.”

“Nope,” Gareth tells him. “Sorry. There’s no one who matches that description here, but your visit doesn’t have to be a complete waste of time. Why don’t you stay for lunch?” he looks over his shoulder at a man with dark curly hair who happens to be his brother. “Hey, Alex,” he says before the turns back to Lucy. “We’ve got nothing to hide,” he adds, “but the welcome wagon is a whole lot nicer. Alex will take you and answer any questions you have about us, but first I need to see everyone’s weapons. If you could just lay them down in front of you.”

Lucy shrugs and draws her revolvers before she takes her .22 out of the holster behind her back and sets her machete on the floor. There are thin blades made for throwing concealed in the backs of her boots and a short épée in the shaft of her cane, but she’s going to keep those to herself. Lucy doesn’t go anywhere without hidden weapons these days and what these people don’t know won’t hurt them, as long as they don’t try to hurt her first.

“Just so you know,” Gareth says as Daryl unsheathes his hunting knife and puts it down by the flight groove of his crossbow, “we aren’t those kind of people, but we aren’t stupid either—and you shouldn’t be stupid enough to try anything stupid, but as long as everyone’s clear on that we shouldn’t have any problems. Just solutions.”

Lucy crouches to pick up her guns while Gareth watches her. Daryl slings his crossbow over his shoulder and sheathes his knife before he curls one of his hands over the curve of her waist. Lucy exhales in a quiet whoosh as the fulcrum of his calloused thumb strokes the soft hyperbola where her thick waist melts into her left hip through the fabric of her dress and slumps her shoulders in a futile attempt to decompress.

“Follow me,” Alex says and smiles at them as Rick holsters his colt and keeps one hand on its grip while he walks.

Daryl slinks an arm around her shoulders as Lucy hobbles, setting the pace. “So,” he mutters, “how long has this place been here?”

“Since almost the start,” Alex tells him as he turns around the corner of the building hewn out of weathered brick. “When all of the refugee camps got overrun, people found this place. I think it was instinct, you know? Follow a path. Some folks were heading to the coast, others out west or up north, but eventually they all wound up here.”

Lucy stops by one corner at the end of a row of garden beds and glances around the courtyard full of wooden tables topped with mismatched umbrellas. It’s bright and beaming with sunshine, but she can’t shake the feeling that something is horribly wrong here. _Something is rotten in the state of Georgia_ , she thinks, _and the monsters are due on Maple Street_.

“Hi,” the woman behind the barbecue says and smiles at them as the meat sizzles and Lucy tries not to gag or choke on the smell. “I heard you came in through the backdoor. Smart.”

Alex smiles back at her. “Hey,” he says, “Mom, would you fix each of these folks a plate for me?”

“No,” Lucy mumbles and ekes the _oh_ sound out awkwardly, “don’t fix a plate for me. I can’t eat meat. I’m allergic.”

Rick doesn’t miss the look the woman behind the barbecue gives Alex as he takes a plate and piles some ribs onto it. “Why do you do it?” he asks. “Why do you let people in?”

“If more people become a part of us, we get stronger,” Alex explains, “that’s why we put up the sings and invite people in. It’s how we survive—”

Rick abruptly knocks the plate he was offering to him out of his hands and grabs his wrist hard enough to shut him up. “Where the hell did you get this watch?” he snarls.

Lucy slants her gaze to Daryl as she hobbles over to defuse the situation. “What’s wrong with his watch?” she asks.

Rick huffs. “It’s not his,” he says. “It was Ed’s.”

“Ed?” Lucy frowns, the space between her eyebrows crumpling up like tinfoil. “Carol’s shitbag ex-husband?” she asks.

Rick nods curtly. “Yep,” he grits out.

Lucy frowns exponentially harder. “Ed died at the quarry over a year ago. We buried him,” she says and turns her head to look at Alex before she asks, “how did you get his watch?”

Rick clenches his jaw and draws his Colt out of its holster. “Carol, Morgan, and I took Sophia, Duane, and Carl to sweep a cul de sac a few miles from the fortress before the epidemic,” he informs her. “We found a couple holed up in one of the houses, blond guy and his disabled girlfriend. Carol gave him this watch and told ’em both to meet us in an hour. Sophia found the girl’s leg in the greenhouse at another one of the houses. We found the rest of her body in the street with a zombie feeding on her. We never saw the guy again. We swept the neighborhood to see if he was still there, but he was just…gone.”

“Where the hell’d you get the watch?” Daryl growls and points his crossbow at the woman behind the grill as Glenn and Sasha aim their rifles at the snipers on the roof of the building above them.

Alex holds up his hands in surrender. “You want answers?” he asks. “You get ’em when you put down the gun.”

Lucy draws one of her .38 Special revolvers and counts the people in the courtyard. There are nine of them, including the people on the rooftop that she can see. Lucy sighs as her husband moves to put himself in between her and the snipers. “Where did you get that watch?” she wants to know. “I’m not going to ask again.”

Alex flicks his gaze to her before he answers her question. “I got it off a zombie,” he says. “I didn’t think he’d need it.”

“Shut up,” Gareth tells him sharply.

Alex flinches at the harsh tone of his voice. “Gareth,” he says, “I’ve got this. We can wait—”

“Shut up, Alex.” Gareth tells his brother in a low voice that sounds like the slice of a knife. “There’s nothing left to say,” he says and smiles ruefully before he adds, “they don’t trust us anymore.”

Lucy drops her cane and shoots one of the snipers in the head. Sasha puts a round in head of the other man on the roof and fires at the people in the courtyard as the bullets fly on both sides. Glenn has never killed anyone before, but that doesn’t stop him from laying down cover fire while they retreat. There are more snipers on the roof shooting at them ineffectually, sparks flaring up from where bullets drill tiny holes in the asphalt underfoot. Lucy wheezes as a rolling door shuts to cut them off at the exit of the building where they had to take cover and frowns as they run through a metal door marked with the letter _A_.

“Help!” a cacophony of screams echoes from a train car marked with the letter _B_ as they run past a tarp covered in bloodstained human remains. “Let us out! Help!”

Daryl frowns and looks back at the train car over his shoulder. “What the hell?” he grunts.

“Keep going!” Rick shouts over the ricochet of gunfire.

Lucy stops to reload her revolver as Bob yanks open the door at the other end of the hallway they ran down. Flickering candlelight drips out of the room behind the door, the smell of smoldering wax burning into her nostrils as the door shuts behind them. Lucy tries to breathe in through her mouth because some of the candles are scented and some of their smells don’t mix, but she can still taste hints of the malodorous amalgamation. Flowers are strewn in dried out bouquets among the clusters of lit candles. _Never Again, Never Trust_ and _We First, Always_ is written on the wall in matte black paint.

“What the hell is this place?” Daryl mutters while he reads the writing on the wall.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly as she reads the names written in white on the floor to form a circle that blooms from the center of the room. “Those snipers were shooting at our feet,” she says, “they weren’t trying to kill us. I think they’re herding us somewhere. Like sheep. Or cattle.”

“Our people must be takin’ out their security force by now,” Daryl says gruffly, “we just gotta wait for ’em t’ come in and cavalry our asses the hell outta here.”

Lucy tries not to flinch with her whole body as the door Glenn was trying to pry open shuts with a loud clunk. “There’s only one way out,” she says. “Let’s go see where they’re herding us.”

* * *

When she walks out into the harsh daylight, Lucy doesn’t run and her ankle throbs with every step she takes. There’s a curved line of railway that shows her the way to a train car marked with the letter _A_. Gareth is up on the rooftop with the snipers, calling the shots. Pun unintended.

“Drop your weapons. Now!” he shouts. “Take out your radio earpieces and put them on the ground.”

Lucy doesn’t hesitate to put down her guns and machete with its sheath that Daryl made for her out of deerskin. Or her radio. There’s a GPS tracker embedded in her boot. Chances are they don’t know about it, since they’re not making her take her shoes off. Which probably means they don’t have the technology to detect it.  _Nine guards with semiautomatic rifles at the fence_ , she thinks, _and three snipers that we didn’t kill on the roof. All we have to do is stay alive long enough for our people on the outside to even those odds and get us the hell out of here_.

“Sheriff, go to your left,” Gareth says, “go to the train car. Now the archer. Now the medic. Now the firefighter. Now the pizza guy.”

Lucy sucks in a sharp breath. _These people knew who we were_ , she deduces, _they somehow knew who we were before we got here. There’s no other way they could know about what my people were doing pre-apocalypse_.

“Stand at the door,” Gareth says. “Sheriff, archer, firefighter, medic, pizza guy, open the door and go inside in that order.”

Daryl growls low in his throat and falls in line because Lucy gives him a look that says _be still and don’t get yourself killed_ without saying much of anything at all.

“What about me?” Lucy calls out as the door of the train car shuts with a heavy sound.

Gareth looks down on her and smirks. “I have other plans for you,” he says.


	21. Route 66

**I read**  
**in the newspaper today**  
**that a tiny wasp may rescue dying American elms,**  
**the old war of babies,**  
**the fastest growing larvae eating others up,**  
**you learn to fight back,**  
**to take what you want,**  
**to eat a lot**  
**and protect your sleep**  
**when you’re young;**

 **I look at the stars**  
**on this clear night**  
**with corny thoughts about distance and time,**  
**wondering what it means**  
**to survive,**  
**if you have to eat others**  
**to do it.**

Diane Wakoski, “The Stargazer”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XII**  
_Too Far Gone_  
**Chapter 21**  
Route 66

* * *

_Wednesday, 15 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 520._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Slaughterhouse of Terminus,_  
_Formerly Known as Collier Metals._

* * *

Daryl squints out through a split metallic seam behind the sliding door of the train car and tries to scrutinize their surroundings. “Alright,” he mutters, “got four of them pricks comin’ our way.”

“You know what to do,” Rick says as he tucks the pocketknife he was using to saw a slice of wood away from the wall of the train car back into his sock, “we go for their eyes first, then their throats.”

Daryl has a pair of the same throwing knives Lucy keeps in her boots sheathed above his ankles under the legs of his jeans. When he patted them all down, Alex missed those knives with their wide but thin blades—sharp but strangely delicate.

 _Ain’t no way this is gonna work_ , Daryl had said earlier that morning at the asscrack of dawn. _These knives won’t kill zombies_.

Lucy had smiled at him in the innocuous way she has that doesn’t show her teeth. _Nope_ , she told him softly and popped the _p_ sound before she yawned, _but we might have to fight our way out of Terminus without our guns and they’re perfect for slashing throats_.

“Put your backs to the walls on either side of the car now,” one of their captors yells, his voice muffled.

 _Hope for the best_ , Daryl thinks. _Plan for the worst. It’s what my girl would do_.

“Move!” Glenn shouts as the Terminants drop a smoke grenade and flashbang through the hatch in the ceiling of the car and a discordant clamor of light and sound blares out to stun and blind them.

It’s enough to disorient them while their captors in gas masks gag them with rags and bind them with zip ties. After they’re dragged out into the harsh daylight with smoke in their eyes and radiant phosphenes flaring behind their eyelids, the Terminants put burlap sacks on their heads. When the sacks come off, they’re on their knees in a slaughterhouse full of human bodies cut into chunks of red meat. There’s a droning metallic sound, the buzz of a bone saw. It’s a sound Daryl knows intimately, since he’s watched Lucy cut up corpses and crack open their chests ad nauseam.

Daryl struggles to snap his way out of the zip ties around his ankles and wrists while one of the men in a rubber apron sharpens his knife and another man brandishes a metal bat to fine-tine his skull cracking swing. It’s brutal and clinical, the way they knock the scrawny blond guy at the other end of the trough right upside the head and slit his throat so his blood spills down the drain.

Gareth walks in before they get to Glenn, who’s next in line. “Hey guys,” he says, “what were your shot counts?”

“Thirty-eight,” the butcher with the bat says as Daryl slinks one of his knives up his sleeve while they’re distracted. It’s eerie how much Gareth reminds him of Lucy in that moment, holding a notebook and writing down the number of shots his people fired.

“Hey,” Gareth calls out sharply before he arches his eyebrows at the butcher with the knife before the butcher with the bat has a chance to take a swing at Glenn, “your shot count?

“Crap, man…” the butcher with the knife says, “…I’m sorry. It was my first roundup.”

Gareth sighs. “After you’re done here,” he says in a phlegmatic huff, “go back to your point and count the shells. Kaylee won’t be gathering them until tomorrow.”

“Hey,” Bob tries to interject through the gag in his mouth. “Hey, let me talk to you.”

Gareth ignores him while he watches the blood draining out of the four men whose throats his butchers slit. “Four from A,” he murmurs. “Four from D?”

“Yeah,” the butcher with the bat tells him.

Gareth writes something down in his notebook and points to Daryl, who’s glowering at him with pure rage in his eyes. “Don’t kill him,” he orders, “that’s her husband. Medusa will be more likely to cooperate with us if we keep him alive,” he turns and points to Rick before he adds, “and drain him separately. Officer Friendly here is immune and that means we can use his blood as a weapon.”

“Hey,” Bob says urgently through his gag. “Let me talk to you for a minute. Let me talk to you for a minute! Let me talk to you for a minute—”

Gareth sighs before he stops across from Bob on the other side of the trough and hunches over to yank the gag out of his mouth. “What?” he asks.

“Don’t do this,” Bob says. “There’s a way out of all this. You just have to take a chance. Lucy can stop it, she’s got a cure, she _is_ the cure. We can put the world back to how it was.”

Gareth shakes his head. “No,” he says, “can’t go back, Bob.”

“We can!” Bob screams as Gareth puts the damp rag back in his mouth. “You don’t have to do this!”

Gareth turns back to the butchers. “You have two hours to slaughter the cattle from A and get them all on the driers,” he says, “I’m going to talk to Medusa and go back to public face. Now’s the time we can get messy, but we need to dial it all in by sundown.”

Daryl uses the edge of the trough to pull the gag out of his mouth and spits a wad of saliva on the floor of the slaughterhouse. “You lead people here,” he grits out. “You take what they got and kill ’em, is that what this place is?”

Gareth turns and looks at him. “Not at first,” he says, “but this is what it had to be.”

* * *

Lucy gasps and sucks in gulps of air as she bolts upright, the space between her waking and sleeping like the stylus of a turntable scratching the surface of a record. _What the…_ she thinks woozily. _What fresh hell is this?_

“Welcome back,” Gareth says, his voice cusped by sounds of chewing.

Lucy groans internally as her eyelids refuse liftoff. “What…did you use to knock me out?” she asks, her voice sluggish and borderline slurred.

“I had my mom inject you with a local anesthetic before she put you under general anesthesia,” Gareth tells her as he takes another bite of meat, “she used to be a nurse-practitioner. According to her, amnesia can be a common side effect.”

Lucy opens her eyes and glares at him from behind her glasses once she notices how close he is to her—too close for comfort. “I know,” she bites out. “This…” she swallows thickly in spite of how dry her throat is, “…isn’t the first time I’ve been put under anesthesia. Not even close. I hope you gave me the correct dose, asshole. I’m going to cure the zombie virus. I need my brain for that, and incorrect dosage of anesthesia can cause cognitive deficits.”

Gareth hums in the back of his throat while he chews. Lucy glances down at herself and swallows a scream at the sight of the open incision in the exposed skin of her thigh. Gareth is eating her alive, taking bites out of her subcutaneous tissue with a spork. “It’s ironic,” he says, “your shoulder tattoo. It’s the Addams family motto, right? ‘ _Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc_ ,’” he quotes with a smirk. “‘We gladly feast on those who would subdue us. Not just pretty words.’”

Lucy sinks her teeth into the inside of her cheek as her stomach roils with sheer disgust. “If you think eating me alive is going to make you immune,” she rasps, “you’re wrong. It won’t.”

“Why’s that?” Gareth wants to know.

Lucy exhales loudly through her nose and screws her eyelids shut again. “It’s inefficient to pass my hypodermis through your digestive tract in order to absorb my immunity,” she informs him, “a blood transfusion from me only makes someone immune for a week or two at the most. If blood fortified with my antibodies doesn’t make you permanently immune, my flesh isn’t going to either.”

“What do you think would be the most efficient way to absorb your immunity?” Gareth asks her with a curious lilt in his voice.

Lucy shrugs, one-shouldered. “Probably a bone marrow transplant,” she says matter-of-factly, “but that’s not something I would recommend. There’s no such thing as universal donor bone marrow. Human leukocyte antigen polymorphic markers and haplotypes determine whether or not someone is a match. There are approximately three hundred HLA proteins that a person can potentially have, so the odds of you or any of your people being a match for my specific HLA antibodies are slim to none.”

“You know,” Gareth says as he puts the spork down on top of the metal table where Lucy is splayed out like a corpse on display in an operating theatre, “if my mom wasn’t a nurse-practitioner, I would say you’re full of crap and you’re just saying that to stop me from eating you.”

Lucy rolls her eyes at him and sees her cane propped up against the side of the autopsy table in her periphery. “These are the facts,” she informs him. “Your knowledge—or lack thereof—about biomedical science doesn’t make anything I said less true.”

“This was originally a sanctuary,” Gareth tells her as he beckons his mother over to suture the open incision on her thigh. “We put up the signs and started broadcasting. We used to help people. We _saved_ people, like you. Until things changed.”

“Some men came,” Mary says as she expertly throws a stitch, “they took this place and they raped and they killed and they laughed over _weeks_ , but we got out and we fought and we got it back, and we heard the message: you’re the butcher or you’re the cattle. We’ve been listening to you on the radio for over a year now,” she adds, “you’re smart and you’re a survivor in the same way that we are. I think you’re going to fit right in here. We could use someone like you.”

“Okay,” Lucy says and ekes the _oh_ sound out into an awkward _ooh_ as she tucks her cane in the crook of her elbow and sits perfectly still while Mary patches her up. “There’s just one problem…” she murmurs as she draws the épée blade from inside the sheath of her cane to stab the older woman and slit her throat deeply enough that arterial blood splatters all over her face, “…I’m not a thing you can use.”

* * *

It takes an hour for their people to massacre the security force of Terminants and blow up the propane tank in the yard. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils at the sound of the explosion peppered with gunfire and surreptitiously cuts the plastic zip ties around his ankles. If everything is going according to their contingency plan, Horde Omicron has torn the fence down by now.

“You there, Gareth?” the butcher with the knife asks as static fizzles on the other end of his walkie-talkie.

“He’s busy,” the butcher with the bat says. “Let’s get back to work.”

“You smell the smoke?” the butcher with the knife asks him incredulously. “You hear the shots? He could be dead. What the hell are we even doing here?” he shakes his head before he says, “the whole place could be going up.”

“Look,” the butcher with the bat retorts, “you went on one roundup and you blew protocol. We don’t deal with security,” he frowns as the butcher with the knife shakes his head and starts walking away, “that ain’t our job. This is. Hey—”

Only he doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence, because Rick stabs him in the neck and guts the other butcher with the piece of wood he sawed from the side of the train car. Daryl slices the zip tie around his wrists and cuts Glenn free before he helps Bob, who’s still on his shit list. Alex is splayed out on top of a metal autopsy table with a bullet hole in his head.

“Sounds like our people got inside the fence,” Sasha huffs.

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Sounds like a damn war,” he mutters and takes off in the same direction Gareth went. Chances are that’s where Lucy is.

“What the hell are these people?” Glenn rasps, his voice hushed in horror at the sight of the human bodies cut into slabs of meat hanging from hooks.

Daryl clenches his jaw and grips the hilt of his knife so hard his knuckles go white and bloodless. “No,” he growls, “they ain’t people.”

* * *

Lucy swipes at the splatters of arterial spray all over her face and glares at the cannibal who took a bite out of her thigh from behind her bloodstained glasses while she yanks her leggings back up over her waist and smooths her the skirt of her dress over her trembling legs.

Gareth holds up his hands in surrender. “I want to explain myself a little,” he says as he backs away from her, “my mom used to say that every day above ground was a win. It doesn’t really apply to this world anymore, but you can still get some perspective. We’re above ground here. It wasn’t just a trap. There was going to be a choice: you join us or feed us. When bears start to starve, they eat their young,” he explains as she rises up and grips the edge of the autopsy table while she wobbles on her feet, “if the mother bear dies, the cub dies anyway, but if the bear lives it can always have another cub. We didn’t want to hurt anyone, but at the end of the day—no matter how much I hate all this ugly business—a man’s gotta eat.”

Lucy scoffs. “There’s no shortage of resources,” she snarls at him, “this country was sustaining a population of three hundred and nine million pre-apocalypse. Crops reseed. Trees bear fruit. Zombies reduce the number of nonhuman scavengers that could potentially contaminate the leftover nonperishable food. There’s a shortage of people that you’ve been contributing to ever since you started luring survivors into a web of lies with your whole ‘I have within my pantry good store of all that’s nice; I’m sure you’re very welcome; will you please to take a slice?’ thing. How many people have you eaten?” she asks. “How many women have you treated like objects for your consumption?” she shakes her head slowly and smiles at the sight of Daryl coming up behind the man who tried to eat her alive before she says, “you’re just as much of a monster as the men who raped you.”

Gareth turns on his heels once he notices her looking over his shoulder and sees the muzzle of one of the revolvers he took away from her aimed at his face. Daryl shoves him back toward Lucy and grabs him by the front of his shirt to stop him from toppling over. Morgan and Carol aim their automatic rifles at his head while the rest of Gamma team—Andrea, Gert, Alisha, and Tara—guard the exits.

There’s blood and viscera splotched all over their ponchos and they’re wearing safety goggles to keep the sweat out of their eyes. Lucy wipes her épée blade on the bloodstained fabric of her skirt and puts it back inside the shaft of her cane while Tara plops the other weapons they confiscated from her on the autopsy table. “Sorry we’re late,” Carol says as Lucy holsters her other revolver and draws her machete out of its sheath.

Gareth turns and looks at her over his shoulder. “No point in begging, right?” he asks.

“Nope,” Daryl growls.

Gareth sighs as he smiles at her ruefully. “You could’ve been one of us,” he tells Lucy. “You could’ve listened to what the world is telling you.”

“I’m not a monster like you,” Lucy murmurs before she takes her machete and slits his throat, “I’m the thing that monsters have nightmares about.”


	22. Laugh, I Nearly Died

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : There is smut in this chapter, specifically Daryl eating Lucy out in the shower in the aftermath of a traumatic day before he gets cockblocked by the plot. **Beware**.
> 
>  **Additional Tags** : Rough Kissing, Neck Kissing, Biting, Foreplay, Breastplay, Shower Sex, Oral Sex, Cunnilingus.

**I used to think sex was just a mirror**  
**you’d stand before**  
**and see monsters**

 **now I know it’s something alive**  
**you slide a knife into**  
**that doesn’t even bleed**

Sam Sax, “Chastity”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XII**  
_Too Far Gone_  
**Chapter 22**  
Laugh, I Nearly Died

* * *

_Wednesday, 15 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 520._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Mechanicsville._

* * *

Lucy becomes abruptly, startlingly aware of the pain in her incision as soon as they arrive at their rendezvous point: the intersection of the train tracks and Fortress Avenue. “Ow,” she gasps and grabs the handle of her cane so hard she pops her knuckles because her thighs rub together when she walks and it hurts like a motherfucker all of a sudden.

Daryl slings his crossbow over his shoulder and puts one hand on her waist to support her while he tilts her chin up with the other. “What’s goin’ on?” he asks, “did that sumbitch hurt you?”

Lucy exhales in a gust of air that shudders out of her nose and through her clenched teeth. “Gareth,” she mumbles and fists the hand she isn’t using to grip the handle of her cane in the fabric of his shirt on top of his clavicle, “his mom cut my thigh open and he…” she swallows thickly, “…he was eating me.”

Daryl stares down at her with his blue eyes wide and his jaw slack with shock. “What?” he growls.

Lucy wobbles on her feet and leans into the lean muscular wall of his body in a futile attempt to calm the maelstrom of panic brewing deep in her chest. Daryl kisses her forehead and holds her while she drops unceremoniously to her knees, bringing him to his knees with her in his arms. Lucy wheezes as the rapid beat of her heart thudding in her ears gets loud enough to eclipse the world around her and her entire body trembles under the force of her anxiety. _Whoop_ , she thinks. _There it is_.

“Here we go,” Kate says as she crouches behind her friend and rubs her back, “she doesn’t feel anything traumatic until the crisis is averted. Then she has a panic attack. Happens every time.”

Rosita nods and flicks her gaze to Abraham, who nods right back at her. “Totally understandable,” she says, “but we need to get the hell out of here.”

“No,” Daryl snarls as Lucy buries her face in the crook of his neck. “Y’all need t’ go along the fences and use the assault rifles t’ take the rest of these assholes out.”

Carol shakes her head slowly. “Daryl,” she says, “it’s over. We set their stronghold on fire and filled it with zombies.”

“We took their fences down,” Morgan adds, “they’ll run or they’ll die.”

Daryl clenches his jaw and holds Lucy while he inhales deeply through his nose to breathe in the scent of black cherries and blood caught in the soft frizz of her hair. “No,” he grits out, “they don’t get t’ live. This ain’t over ’til they’re all dead.”

“We need to get back to the fortress,” Lucy rasps as she extricates herself from him long enough to use her cane to stand up, “these people were listening to us on the radio almost since the beginning of the global outbreak. Which,” she says and lets Daryl tuck her under his sinewy arm while they all make their way back to the rig, “means the cannibals know where we live. If they survive, they’re probably going to come after us. We should also get me a CT scan to make sure that my leg doesn’t get infected and fall off.”

Carol smiles at her. “I can take a look at your incision on the way home,” she offers while Rick hauls the back hatch open.

Lucy squawks awkwardly as Daryl scoops her up and puts her in the back of the rig before he climbs in with her. “Okay,” she says and ekes the _oh_ sound out into a shrill _ooh_ , “anyone who doesn’t want to see me with my pants off needs to ride in another rig.”

Daryl snorts. “It’s nothin’ I ain’t seen before,” he drawls.

* * *

_Wednesday, 15 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 520._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_I-85 Southbound._

* * *

Beta team consists of Kate, Liam, Nico, T-Dog, Rosita, and Abraham. Delta team consists of Eliot, Parker, Alec, Tyreese, Karen, and Anton. There are three semi-trucks parked at the rendezvous point, each rig equipped with a minifridge and first-aid kit. Daryl gets Anton to help him put his bike in the back of the semi-trailer while the people from Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta team pile into the other two semi-trucks like sardines in automotive cans. Nico and Kate get in the back of the semi-trailer with Lucy, Daryl, and Carol. T-Dog and Liam ride in the other rigs because they don’t want to see Lucy with her pants off. Lucy unzips her boots and shimmies out of her leggings before she extracts a makeup bag festooned with owls from the backpack she left behind in the rig and gets out a spray bottle of lens cleaner. There’s still arterial blood splattered on her glasses, not to mention all over her face.

Carol uses a flashlight to get a better look at her incision while she cleans her glasses and uses alcohol swabs to wipe the blood away. “These sutures are going to leave a scar,” she murmurs, “I’m going to remove them and use the Dermabond in our first-aid kit to close the incision.”

One of the awesome things about living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland is that she can get cool shit like skin glue without having to pay an obscene amount of money for 2-Octyl-cyanoacrylate. Lucy adjusts her glasses on top of her nose and nods. “Okay,” she says, “go for it.”

Daryl squints at her over his shoulder in the slivers of illumination from the flashlight and takes her hand in both of his. “Y’ain’t goin’ out in the field no more,” he says gruffly. “I dunno what the hell you’ve been tryin’ t’ prove, but it ends now. You hear me?”

Lucy arches her eyebrows at him. “Was that an order?” she asks him with a hint of warning in her voice.

“No,” Daryl says, “it’s how it’s gotta be. There ain’t no reason you should be out in the field now that you’ve got your genetic sequencer. We got other people for that,” he brings her hand to his lips and kisses her knuckles while she digs her fingers into the back of his hand and winces as Carol removes her fresh stitches before he adds, “you’ve got me.”

Lucy bites her lip and nods, a sharp descent of her chin. “I know,” she tells him softly.

“Daryl’s right,” Nico chimes in and points at her imperiously, “and you hate the outdoors anyway. No more outdoors for you.”

Lucy snorts and gnaws on the inside of her cheek as Carol applies a third and final viscous layer of adhesive. “Okay,” she says. “No more outdoors for me.”

* * *

_Wednesday, 15 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 520._  
_Newnan, GA;_  
_The Post-Apocalyptic Fortress of Sarpedon,_  
_Formerly Known as West Georgia Correctional Facility._

* * *

When she calls a meeting of the council to hear a report about the radio signals Alec detected in the city, one member is conspicuously absent. “Where’s Maggie?” Lucy asks.

Glenn hunches over the desk and puts his elbows on the wooden surface in front of him before he answers her question. “Maggie had a plan to get captured,” he says. “Amy implanted a GPS tracker in her back yesterday so we’d be able to find her, and Beth.”

Lucy opens her mouth and holds up her hands, her fingers snarling into gnarled incredulous fists. “What,” she bites out.

“I watched her until they showed up and ran her down,” Alec says, “it wasn’t the same car that hit Beth, but it did have the same white cross painted on the rear windshield. I tracked the signals from their radio back to Grady Memorial Hospital. Which is one of the places on the list Tara made.”

Tara ducks her head and nods. “Grady Memorial Hospital was part of a network of three detention centers run by the Atlanta Corrections Department,” she explains, “the detainees at Grady Detention Center were assigned to work custodial jobs at the hospital.”

“Only those jobs basically constituted slave labor,” Alec points out, “since the Thirteenth Amendment stated that slavery or involuntary servitude was still legal as punishment for a crime.”

Lucy exhales a frustrated noise that flares her nostrils. “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?” she asks.

“You would’ve told us not to do it,” Glenn says.

Lucy sighs. “No,” she retorts. “I would’ve said not today, not until we found out whether or not Terminus was a threat. Now we’re down two people and I still have arterial blood from the cannibals whose throats I slit all over my clothes. I thought you trusted me,” she bites down on the inside of her cheek before she says, “and I thought you respected me enough to let me know before you put one of our people at risk.”

Glenn stares at her with his mouth hanging open. “Lucy,” he says, “I didn’t mean—”

Lucy holds up one hand to stop him midsentence. “No,” she echoes, “not today. I can’t…” she furls her fingers awkwardly while she articulates, “…I can’t take any more stress today. I’m going to take a shower and you’re going to make a plan to get Beth and Maggie back. It’s almost time for dinner,” she hobbles out from behind the circulation desk and tilts her head to look at the clock on the wall before she whispers more to herself than anyone else, “‘let us eat, and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.’”

* * *

Lucy strips out of her bloodstained clothes and drops them in the green hamper in the hallway with her name on the plastic lid before she hobbles into the showers. There’s a green plastic chair in one corner that she uses to avoid putting unnecessary weight on her ankle. Lucy flops onto the seat of the chair and squints at the spigot as she turns the water on. It spills over her and she lets herself sink, the pressure of the water raining down on her eclipsing the anxiety that hooks and claws in the bottomless pit of her stomach. Dermabond can’t get wet for twenty-four hours, so her cannibalized thigh is wrapped in gauze and covered in shrink wrap. After she uses her soft body wash to meticulously scrub herself clean, Lucy rinses the conditioner out of her hair and exhales a vociferous whoosh of air. “Daryl,” she calls out, “you’re not as stealthy as you think. I can feel you watching me.”

Daryl hums low in his throat, a guttural _mm-hmm_ sound that makes her get wet in a way that has nothing to do with taking a shower. “You gonna be okay?” he asks her with a grit of worry in his voice as he walks over to stand next to her shower chair barefoot in his jeans and sleeveless black undershirt.

Lucy grabs her glasses from the metal tray for soap where she stashes them during her shower time and puts them back on. “I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone,” she informs him, “not anymore. Maybe I was once upon a time, but these days I go out in the field because I’m better equipped to cope with traumatic experiences than most people. If what happened to me at Terminus this afternoon had happened to anyone else, the emotional fallout would’ve been a hell of a lot worse than what I’m going through right now. I’m the person who shoves her arms in the mouths of the undead to protect my friends, the person who runs off into the woods to save a little girl from the flesh-eating monsters…” she taps her fingertips against the shrink wrap on her thigh before she says, “…the only difference between that and what happened this afternoon is that these flesh-eating monsters were alive instead of undead.”

Daryl crouches down in front of her to spread her thighs apart, thumbing the edge where the plastic meets her soft freckled skin while the water spills over his head and sluices down his back to soak through his shirt and jeans. “I’ve been worried sick about ya’,” he tells her sharply, “we all have. It’s like ya’ said the other day: you’ve been depressed and pushin’ everyone but me away. I didn’t think I could tell you that I’ve been so damn worried you’re hurtin’. I dunno how t’ help ya’. I can’t do nothin’ t’ make ya’ feel better.”

Lucy bites her lip and is suddenly aware that she’s buck naked and he’s staring at her with raw heat in his eyes. When he looks at her mouth, she goes taut with anticipation and arousal coils up tight inside her. Lucy hunches over and cups his face in both hands, his stubble rough against her palms. “I feel better,” she says. “I’ve felt better since I told you what was going on with me, and even better since I started going to therapy again. I love you, but I’m mentally ill and you can’t magically cure my depression or anxiety no matter how much you love me back. I’ve upped my daily paroxetine dosage by half a pill to mitigate the downward spiral and I promise to stop going out in the field as soon as Beth and Maggie are safe and sound. Okay?”

“Yeah,” Daryl says before he fists his other hand in her hair and kisses her hard. “Okay.”

Lucy moans into his mouth and scoots to the edge of her seat until she’s flush against him, the soaking wet fabric of his shirt oddly fluid and clinging to the hard muscles of his chest and stomach. Daryl tugs on her hair to tilt her head up and kisses the corner of her mouth, burning kisses into the curve of her chin and nipping his way along the stubborn line of her jaw to the divot behind her ear before he bites down on the pulse thrumming in the side of her neck. Lucy makes a sharp desperate sound and uses her hands to undo his zipper without even looking before she uses her toes to peel his pants down his thighs.

Daryl hunches to nibble on her collarbone and kicks his pants the rest of the way off while he smooths his hands over the curves of her waist and grabs her by the hips, curling his fingers into her soft flesh hard enough to bruise. “You good with this?” he asks her before he sucks on the side of her neck and drags the flat of his tongue over where he sank his teeth into her skin.

Lucy ducks her head to lick the shell of his ear and tugs his earlobe in between her teeth. “I want you to eat me,” she whispers conspiratorially, “but in the fun way, not in the cannibal way.”

Daryl almost busts a gut laughing and muffles his guffaws in the damp crook of her neck before he yanks his undershirt up over his head and gets on his knees in front of her. “I love you so damn much,” he whispers back, “you know that?”

Lucy grabs his hair and tangles her fingers in the strands at the nape of his neck while he cups her breasts in his hands and rubs her nipples in between his calloused thumbs and forefingers. Daryl groans in the back of his throat when she kisses him soft and sweet and slow, nipping at his bottom lip before she breaks the kiss and nuzzles his nose with hers. Lucy sucks in a sharp breath and squirms in her seat while he ducks his head and licks one of her achingly hard nipples with the flat of his tongue. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound breathlessly. “I love you, too.”

Daryl nuzzles her soft flabby stomach while he splays his hands over her inner thighs and uses his thumbs to spread her open. Lucy squirms under his scrutiny while he takes his sweet time savoring the mouthwatering scent of her arousal before he buries his face in her soft, hot pussy. Daryl slowly drags his tongue up from the bottom of her slit and nuzzles the swollen nub of her clit, his nose rubbing up against her while he fucks her as deep as his tongue can go inside of her. There’s a glut of gleaming wetness dripping out of her pussy, trickling onto the plastic seat of her chair and down his chin. Daryl groans and nuzzles the plump crease of her, his balls hanging tight and heavy between his legs while the head of his throbbing cock bumps against his stomach and a bolt of raw heat shoots along his spine. Lucy bites her lip and tries to ride his face until he digs his fingers into her thighs to hold her where he wants her. Daryl is breathless and lightheaded as steam froths up around them in a futile attempt to fill the room, so high on the smell and taste and shine of her that he loses himself in the undiluted pleasure of knowing that she feels safe enough to open up for him and let him show her just how much he loves her without using his words.

Lucy comes so hard she arches her back and knocks her plastic chair against the wall of the shower when he sucks on her clit and swirls his tongue over the hard nub before he tugs it between his teeth and bites down. Daryl hums in the back of his throat and he doesn’t stop until he makes her into a sopping wet mess of slick, sweet trembling flesh. Lucy watches him lick his fingers clean and swipe at his mouth with the back of his hand before he stands up and turns the water off. Daryl has scars on his back and stomach, old and new; his face and neck are flushed red and his dick is hard, with precome dripping from the slit on the blunt head peeking out from his foreskin. Lucy is blushing from her ears to the tops of her breasts, her pussy clenching tight in anticipation of being thoroughly fucked.

Unfortunately, someone in the hall chooses that inopportune moment to call her name. “Lucy?” Sasha asks, a spike of urgency in her voice. “We need your help.”

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips as Daryl groans and buries his face in his palm. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“It’s Bob,” Sasha says, “he was bitten.”

* * *

Lucy changes into a camisole and leggings that aren’t bloodstained and puts on an oversized sweater before she hobbles down the hall to the infirmary. “What do we know?” she asks as she twists her damp hair into a messy bun to keep the residual water from trickling down her neck.

Amy looks up from the microscope on the counter. “Bob told us that he was bitten at Terminus,” she informs her. “Lilly gave him a transfusion of your blood two hours ago, but he’s not getting better.”

Lucy frowns, the space between her eyebrows furrowing. “It should be working by now,” she says, “his body should be fighting the infection and making new antibodies.”

“I know,” Amy says, “I followed your protocol. I have no idea why he’s not responding to the treatment.”

Lucy created a protocol for exposure to the zombie virus that consists of a plasma transfusion using her blood followed by hourly diagnostic tests over a night of observation. “Show me his test results,” she says before she turns and looks over her shoulder at Sasha. “It could just be a delayed reaction,” she explains, “we have no way of knowing how somebody is going to respond to the introduction of foreign antibodies in their system because everybody is different. I’m going to need a sample of his cerebrospinal fluid, a flow-sensitive MRI, and a MRI angiography to check his brain function.”

“What if it’s not just a delayed reaction?” Sasha asks her.

Lucy peers into the microscope to look at the sample from his cerebrospinal fluid culture from the lumbar puncture that Amy took in accordance with the protocol. “There’s a point of no return for people infected with the zombie virus,” she says in the phlegmatic voice she uses to avoid infodumping at the speed of light, “live HZV-B gets into your bloodstream. It eventually gets through the blood-brain barrier and inflames the membranes that protect your meninges—your brain and your spinal cord. Which destroys core brain structures and inhibits homeostasis, and that in turn causes hypercytokinemia and multisystem organ failure. It was something the scientists at the C. D. C. figured out by studying the infected before the disease went global. I’ve only been able to avoid that because I always gave people transfusions before the virions in their bloodstream got a chance to attack their central nervous systems. It seems like Bob might be past the point of no return, and my blood isn’t a miracle cure. I can kill the virus, but I can’t fix brain damage.”

“So you’re saying you can’t do anything for him,” Sasha deduces and shakes her head before she snaps, “then what good are you?”

Lucy sighs. “I’m only human,” she says. “I’m not good. I never said I was.”

“You’re wrong,” Bob rasps from where he’s splayed out on one of the hospital beds, “until Daryl and Glenn found me, I didn’t know if there were any good people left. I didn’t know if _anybody_ was left. You took me in. You take people in and give ’em hope. You showed me that we still have something worth fighting for, worth living for. You’re gonna fix this whole damn world.”

Sasha sniffles and sucks in a shuddering breath. Tyreese puts an arm around her shoulders while she shakes and lets her hide her face in the front of his shirt. Karen squeezes his upper arm before she tries to step back and give them space, but he intertwines his fingers with hers and holds on tight.

“I’m so sorry,” Lucy mumbles. “There’s nothing we can do.”


	23. Think

**The difference between the truth and a lie is that both of them can hurt, but only one will take the time to heal you afterward.**

Mira Grant, _Feed_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XII**  
_Too Far Gone_  
**Chapter 23**  
Think

* * *

_Wednesday, 15 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 520._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Grady Memorial Hospital._

* * *

When the morning comes, Beth wakes in a nebulous haze and inhales the sterile whisper of antiseptic that permeates the room before she opens her eyes. Lackluster is the only descriptor that comes to mind at the sight of the room: the walls are painted a flat shade of white that dulls the sunlight filtering in through the window. When she looks down at herself, her gaze slips over faded gray fabric hanging from her thin shoulders and white sheets festooned with bleak shadows. There’s a clock ticking, clicking by the second with a dull litany of sound. _Get Well Soon!_ a glossy motivational poster on the wall screams at her as she blinks with bleary eyes and sits up sluggishly.

“You’re awake,” a familiar voice murmurs before the speaker heaves a sigh of relief that hunches her spine.

Beth frowns as she looks over her shoulder and sees her sister perched on the hospital bed next to her with a cast on her left arm from her knuckles to just below her elbow. “Maggie?” she whispers back and winces as her cheek throbs where her sutures are stitched into her skin. There’s a splint on her right arm, and it hurts to move her wrist. “Where are we? What’s going on?”

“We’re at a hospital in Atlanta,” Maggie informs her urgently, “some police officers hit you with a car and kidnapped you two days ago. One of the doctors here told me they put you in a medically induced coma because you hit your head and they wanted to keep your brain from swelling too much. I had my helmet on at Georgia Tech, so they didn’t recognize me yesterday when they ran me down and fractured my arm in two places. There’s a tracker embedded in my back. All we gotta do is wait for Lucy to come looking for us.”

Beth glances down at the catheter in her forearm and flinches as the IV pump starts beeping shrilly because her saline drip is empty. Maggie tucks a stray lock of brown hair behind her ear and tries to smooth the tension that creeps up the arch of her spine out before it takes root in her shoulders. When the door creaks open, a policewoman in uniform with her dark brown hair in a tight bun wound at the nape of her neck and a wan bespectacled man in a white coat walk into the room in rapid succession.

“It’s okay,” the doctor says and puts his hands in the pockets of his coat while the policewoman stands next to him with one hand on the grip of her sidearm, “everything’s okay. I’m Dr. Steven Edwards. This is Lieutenant Dawn Lerner,” he inclines his head to accompany his introduction before he asks, “how are you feeling?”

Dawn is a stringent woman in her early thirties with draconian blue eyes that drill into her until Beth has to force herself not to shy away. Edwards is a tall and lanky man in his late thirties with brown hair and brown eyes, a full beard, and a forehead that looks more expansive than it actually is because his hairline is receding. Beth watches him turn the pump off before she answers his question. “Fine,” she says.

“Your wrist was fractured,” Edwards says, “and you sustained a head injury. Can you remember your name?”

Beth ducks her head and nods, sharply. “Beth,” she says.

“You were lost,” Dawn says, “if my officers hadn’t saved you and your sister, you’d both be one of _them_ by now. So,” she narrows her eyes as Beth looks back over her shoulder at Maggie, “you owe us.”

Maggie has to fight the urge to roll her eyes. _Bless your heart_ , she thinks with all the saccharine vitriol of a woman born and bred in the deep South. Maggie is smart enough not to backtalk a cop with a gun, but something about Dawn makes her grind her teeth.

“Let me show you around,” Edwards offers as the policewoman abruptly exits the room to contact her officers on her two-way radio. “We have eight other wards here on this floor,” he explains while he takes the catheter out of her arm.

Beth watches her blood pool in a blot of red before he puts a band-aid on it for her. Maggie rises to her feet and they follow him into the hallway. Dawn is nowhere to be seen.

“Some of the officers were on a run about a week ago,” Edwards says and stops to check on a patient in one of the other hospital rooms, “they found two boxes of Bisquick and a Merle Haggard tape at a truck stop, and this gentleman under a bridge.” Whoever this man is, he’s been hooked up to a ventilator attached to an assortment of car batteries and he’s not showing any signs of life beyond what the machine is doing to help him breathe. “Cardiac arrest and extreme dehydration,” the doctor adds. “I tried to do what I could.”

Maggie narrows her eyes at him before he switches the ventilator off with a detached twist of his fingers. “So you’re just gonna pull the plug on him?” she asks.

Edwards sighs and removes the respirator from the face of the deoxygenated corpse. “If patients don’t show any signs of improvement, Dawn calls it,” he explains.

Beth stares down at the body and swallows thickly. It takes both of them to help Edwards move the corpse onto a gurney for disposal, since they only have two uninjured hands between them. When the doctor stops in the hallway to talk to Dawn while a blocky Japanese policeman in his early thirties lets his gaze linger on Maggie in a way that makes her wish she still had a gun tucked away somewhere. _Well_ , she thinks ruefully as her sister catches sight of the custodian mopping at the other end of the hallway, _at least he’s not looking at Beth_.

“Come on,” Dawn says as another policeman in his late twenties slinks out into the hallway and a girl in her early twenties with brown eyes and brown hair wearing the same monotonous gray clothes as Maggie and Beth shuts the door to her room in his wake, “the body’s getting cold.”

 _These cops are raping the people they should be protecting_ , Maggie deduces as Dawn halts to unlock a set of heavy double doors for them and they wheel the corpse down the hall to the elevator shaft. It makes rage churn and curdle in the visceral pit of her stomach at the injustice, and she’s not even surprised. _Lucy won’t stand for that_ , she thinks, _she’s gonna kill ’em all_.

“How many people live in this place?” Beth wants to know.

Edwards shrugs with his hands steering the gurney. “Just enough to keep us going,” he tells her, “some of us started here, some came as patients, and everyone has a job.”

“Can’t we bury him?” Beth wonders.

Edwards shakes his head. “No,” he says and stops at the gaping maw of an elevator shaft, “we only go out when we need to. It may not be the most dignified disposal system,” he yanks the sheet off the corpse and crouches beside the gurney to stuff the wad of material out of the way, “but we work with what we have. We’ve managed to secure and guard the stairwells, but the windows are blown out on the ground floor. Zombies find their way into the basement when they hear a noise, and if the bodies are warm enough they clean up some of the mess…” he grunts and tips the gurney so gravity can get its hooks into the corpse, “…use everything you can use. Plus,” he smiles at them halfheartedly as the body plummets to the bottom of the elevator shaft, “it’s the fastest way down.”

* * *

Maggie shows her sister where the cafeteria is and gives her the lay of the land while she fills a tray for Dr. Edwards. There are three policewomen at Grady, including Dawn, and nine men: O’Donnell, Lamson, Shepherd, Bello, Jeffries, Tanaka, Alvarado, Gorman, McGinley, Licari and Franco. Lamson and O’Donnell are sergeants, if the gold arrow pins they wear on their uniforms are anything to go by. There are twenty-three people in the hospital, including them. Maggie just needs to find a way to communicate those numbers to Lucy before the cavalry arrives.

It’s eerily clean in the cafeteria, the colorful paint on the walls seeming almost ominous. Beth tries not to flinch as one of the male officers stops and leers at her, the bulwark of the serving counter laden with food in between her and the middle-aged man doing nothing to make her feel safe.

Gorman tucks his clipboard under his arm while she ladles fruit onto a plate. “You’re looking better and better,” he says as her hackles rise. “You don’t remember me, huh?” he asks.

“I was fighting a horde of zombies on campus,” Beth mutters, “and then everything went black.” _Which only happened because you hit me with your car, asshole_ , she thinks. _I remember that much_.

Gorman nods. “Yeah,” he smirks at her, “one was eyeing your thighs when we showed up, but I got there in time. I’m Gorman,” he says as he flicks his gaze to Maggie while he leers at her sister. “When someone does you a favor,” he adds, “it’s a courtesy to show ’em some appreciation. Unless you want me to write down everything you’re taking,” he smirks wider before he adds, “everything costs something. Right?”

“It’s for Dr. Edwards,” Maggie cuts in sharply. “Beth’s his assistant.” _You stay the hell away from her_ goes unspoken, but it doesn’t go unheard.

Beth precariously balances the plastic tray of food while she and her sister walk back down the hall to the office where Edwards lives. “We’ll find Joan,” she overhears Dawn say to a gangly black teenage boy who’s carrying a hamper full of rags. “Until then, you’ve got laundry duty and I want my uniform—”

“Washed separately and pressed,” he says as the lieutenant pedals another mile on the exercise bike in the room of mechanical odds and ends, “I know.”

Dawn huffs. “Smartass.”

Maggie ducks her head to hide a smile as the gangly boy rolls his eyes and gives Dawn a mock salute.

Beth meets his eyes for a fraction of a second and looks away. “Who’s that?” she asks.

“Noah,” Maggie answers as she opens the door to the office, “one of the wards who lives here. I think he’s about your age.”

Beth shuffles through the doorway and looks around at the clutter in the room: stacks of books and loose sheets of paper strewn all over the place, a baroque painting, and a turntable spinning out a blues record. It’s the opening riff of “You Better Run” from the album _All Night Long_. Which is horribly ironic, since the lyrics in the chorus are: _you better run, don't let him get you / you better run, don’t let him get you / if he gets you, babe, he gonna rape you_.

“I used to feel like I was drowning in research,” Edwards says as they stop in front of his disorderly desk, “but now the oceans are dry and I’m suffocating in boredom.”

Beth swallows a derisive noise. “Then you’re lucky,” she informs him. “If you feel safe enough to be bored, you’re lucky.”

Edwards tilts his head and looks up at her. “That’s Junior Kimbrough,” he says and points at his turntable with one finger before he asks, “do you like him?”

Beth balances the tray in her arms and nods, a quick but enthusiastic bobble of her head. Dr. Edwards doesn’t give off a creeper vibe, not like Gorman—he just seems lonely. Beth still isn’t going to trust him willy-nilly or take the chance that he might be trying to lure her into a false semblance of security.

“It’s one of the few perks I get for being the only doctor here,” Edwards says.

Beth hunches over and puts the tray on his desk in front of him. “That,” she says laconically, “and whatever this is?”

“It’s guinea pig,” Edwards tells her before he narrows his eyes behind his glasses. “Where’s your food?” he asks Maggie.

Maggie folds her arms tight across her chest in spite of her cast. “Well,” she murmurs, “the more we take, the more we owe. Right?”

“Have you ever tried guinea pig?” Edwards asks and smiles as they shake their heads. “I didn’t think so. You wouldn’t call it a perk. Sit down,” he says and flails one hand at the mismatched chairs standing around.  “Dawn doesn’t have to know.”

Maggie folds herself into a chair and eyeballs the stack of paper next to her while Edwards hands them a pair of plastic forks. “What kinds of research were you doing?” she wants to know.

“I was part of a multisite clinical trial led by a professor from the University of Alabama,” Edwards tells her, “we were studying the underlying factors associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and looking for a genetic component that contributed to expiratory central airway collapse.”

Maggie tries and fails to hide a smile. If things don’t go horribly wrong, she might be able to vouch for Dr. Edwards and Lucy can drown him in research again.

“It’s a Caravaggio,” Edwards says around a mouthful of guinea pig when catches Beth looking at the baroque painting. “I found it on the street outside the High. Like trash.”

Beth thinks of _The Fortune Teller_ , the Caravaggio that Parker hung in her cell at the prison. _The Denial of Saint Peter_ is a much later work of his, one that should be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s either a forgery, or the painting was on loan to the High before the world went to hell in a handbasket. “It’s beautiful,” she says.

“It doesn’t have a place anymore,” Edwards says and unfolds himself from his head before he shoves his hands in the pockets of his jeans and stands in front of the painting to highlight the coward by obscuring the accuser with his shadow, “art isn’t about survival. It’s about transcendence. Being more than animals. Rising above.”

Maggie knows the story of Saint Peter. It’s in the gospels of John, Matthew, Luke, and Mark. Peter was a coward who denied being a disciple of Christ despite being accused thrice. Nothing transcendent about that. “We can’t do that anymore?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Edwards says in a hush of hopelessness. When he turns and looks at her over his shoulder, he seems lost. Maggie herself is suddenly at a loss for words. If her father was still here, he would know how to comfort this man in his time of need. Maggie doesn’t have any such luxury.

Beth swallows thickly. “I sing,” she tells him softly. “I still sing.”

* * *

Dawn interrupts the palpable silence that ensues to inform Dr. Edwards that a new patient has been brought into the hospital. Sergeant O’Donnell and Officer Shepherd rush him down the hall for triage as Edwards yanks his white lab coat on, the fabric snagging over his shoulders in his haste. O’Donnell is a tall man in his late forties with sharp cheekbones and a look of toxic masculinity about him. Shepherd is a slim woman in her midtwenties with green eyes and brown hair pulled back in a bun, the black pin shaped like an arrow on her uniform marking her as a special investigator. It’s pandemonium, so Maggie and Beth stand back to stay out of their way.

“I found his wallet,” O’Donnell says as Edwards unbuttons the shirt of the unconscious man on the gurney and uses his stethoscope to check the sounds of his breath, “his name is Gavin Trevitt.”

Shepherd nods and steps back to stand by the wall. “Fell from a first-floor apartment trying to get away from some zombies,” she explains.

“This man has lost a lot of blood,” Edwards tells Dawn, “and his vitals are dropping. I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

O’Donnell frowns, his lips curling into a sneer. “We’ve already given him knockout gas—”

“I’ve got this,” Dawn snaps at him sternly before she turns to stare the doctor down and says, “you wanted to save people. So,” she puts her hands on her hips before she orders, “save him.”

Edwards shakes his head incredulously. “I don’t even know the extent of his injuries,” he retorts. “This one’s a loser, and you said you didn’t want me wasting resources—”

“Well,” Dawn cuts him off midsentence, “today I want you to try.”

Edwards frowns and heaves a sigh before he turns and looks at Beth and Maggie. “Okay,” he says as he loops his stethoscope around his neck, “plug the EKG and that ultrasound into the battery pack. Good, now attach it to the patient. I think he has a tension pneumothorax.”

 _Punctured lung_ , Beth thinks. _Amy thought Lucy might have one after the Governor shot her_.

Edwards stares at the image on the screen of the ultrasound while he hunches over his patient and finagles the probe around. “Beth,” he says, “I need one of the cannulas—large, hollow needles—in that cabinet.”

“You need to open up his airway,” Maggie says as Beth attaches the electrodes to the patient. “You can’t cut into his throat. You’re gonna have to use an intercostal space. Right?” Edwards nods, pleasantly surprised. “Our daddy was a doctor,” Maggie explains without elaborating that he used to work on animals pre-apocalypse while the doctor uses the fifth intercostal space between his ribs to create an airway and blood spurts out of the cannula to splatter on the floor. “You pick up a few things.”

Dawn stares at the heart monitor zigzagging like a car chase in a bad action movie and beeping urgently. “Is he gonna make it?” she asks.

Edwards sighs. “This man fell from a building, Dawn,” he says.

Dawn scowls at that. “Is he gonna make it?” she asks him again.

“You see those bruises?” Maggie asks and points at the contusions on his chest, “he’s stable now, but he’s bleeding internally.”

Edwards nods again. “We need a CT scan to see the full extent of his injuries,” he clarifies, “and even if I could determine that, I don’t have the surgical tools to save him. I told you. This was a waste of resources.”

Dawn whirls on Beth and slaps her across the face. “Steve,” she bites down on the sibilant and snaps at him, “try to grasp the stakes here.”

Maggie grits her teeth and exhales with enough force to flare her nostrils. _I’m gonna kill her myself_ , she thinks as Dawn stomps out of the room and slams the door behind her.

“Is she always like that?” Beth asks once they’re back in the room where she woke up and Edwards is done stitching up the laceration on her face with new sutures. Maggie is sitting on the hospital bed next to her, a scalpel she swiped from the other room concealed in her sock.

Edwards laughs halfheartedly. “Yes,” he says, “but only on her bad days. It’s unfortunate for us that bad days are the only kind she has.”

“Noah left you a new shirt,” Maggie tells her tersely. “Courtesy of the lieutenant.”

Beth glances down at herself and frowns, the space between her eyebrows furrowing. “What’s wrong with this one?” she asks.

“Dawn likes things neat,” Edwards says and enunciates the consonant with disdain.

Maggie grins at him. “Then she must love your office,” she says.

“We all have our ways of making her pay,” Edwards deadpans and slips off the stool he was perched on. “I’ll wait for you both outside,” he says before he leaves the room and shuts the door behind him.

Beth changes out of her bloodstained shirt and finds a virulent green lollipop folded up inside. It makes her smile as she walks all the way back out into the dull hallway, until she sees Tanaka and Bello dragging a struggling girl screaming into the other room. Maggie catches sight of the custodian watching her, fists clenched so hard he might be drawing blood.

“Dawn needs you,” Gorman yells at the doctor, “now!”

Beth glances at Maggie as they linger outside the triage room. “Who is she?” she asks, “do you know?”

“Joan,” Maggie tells her, “she escaped from the hospital a few days ago. Gorman was out looking for her when he ran you down.”

Beth peeks into the room as Joan thrashes around in a futile attempt to regain her freedom and bile rises in her throat at the sight of the chunk of flesh torn out of her forearm. _Gorman wasn’t trying to save me_ , she thinks as the officer leers at her, _he thinks he found his next victim_.

“Whatever you were thinking,” Dawn whispers to Joan as she hunches over and straps the girl who almost got away to the hospital bed to keep her from struggling, “it wasn’t worth it. Okay, you have two choices…” she says as Beth watches in horror, “…either we cut off your arm, or you do.”

Joan snarls at her and glares at Gorman. “Screw you and your little bitch,” she bites out.

“Smartass whore!” Gorman yells.

Dawn gives him a warning look and puts a hand on his chest to shove him back. “Gorman, get out of here!” she orders.

Edwards uncaps a syringe with his teeth and spits the plastic cap onto the floor. “It’s anesthetic,” he clarifies, his voice pitching higher in distress as Joan tries to kick him in the balls. “You’re going to need it.”

Joan grits her teeth and tries to kick him again as he holds the needle in one hand and Dawn holds her down. “Go to hell!”

“Okay,” Dawn says, “she made her choice. Steve, do it.”

Beth shakes her head so fast she almost discombobulates herself. “Stop!” she shouts and tries not to flinch as Dawn and Edwards stare at her. “What’s her blood type?” she asks.

“Joan is B positive,” Edwards tells her. “Why?”

Maggie turns and looks at her sister with terror in her green eyes. “Beth,” she says through clenched teeth, “don’t.”

“Joan doesn’t need to lose her arm,” Beth says as she tries and fails to stop her voice from trembling. “Give her my blood.”

Edwards frowns at her as Dawn narrows her sharp eyes at the frail blonde. “What?” the doctor asks.

Beth swallows thickly. “I’m immune to the zombie virus,” she informs him, “a transfusion from me will help her fight the infection so you don’t have to amputate her arm. I’m O positive. I can donate. Give her my blood,” she says and holds out the arm that isn’t in a splint. “Please.”

“Okay,” Dawn says after a tense moment of hesitation and deliberation. “Steve, do it.”

Joan glowers at the lieutenant as she hunches over her again. “I’m not going back to them!” she screams.

“You don’t have to,” Dawn tells her in a fragile voice that shatters like glass in her mouth.

Joan sniffles and chokes back tears. “You can’t control them,” she whispers.

“I will,” Dawn promises.

Maggie looks over her shoulder at Gorman and shakes her head. _No_ , she thinks. _You won’t_.


	24. Doom and Gloom

**Don’t you ever let another human**  
**being tear you apart.**  
**Remember that you have claws**  
**and teeth, too.**

 **Remember that you are better off**  
**whole.**

Trista Mateer, “For Brittanie”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XII**  
_Too Far Gone_  
**Chapter 24**  
Doom and Gloom

* * *

_Wednesday, 15 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 520._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Grady Memorial Hospital._

* * *

Grady Memorial doesn’t have the technology to break the donor blood down and isolate components like red blood cells or platelets, so they set up a whole blood transfusion. Beth winces as Dr. Edwards removes the catheter from her forearm and hangs the IV bag full of her blood next to Joan, who keeps glancing at the open doorway like she expects Gorman to walk in again and attack her like a rabid dog.

Dawn narrows her eyes at Maggie and a suspicious frown droops the corners of her mouth. “Is her immunity hereditary?” she asks.

Maggie swallows the bile rising in the back of her throat and shakes her head. “No,” she answers. _It’s not technically a lie_ , she thinks, _Lucy’s immunity is hereditary. Beth’s is synthetic_. “I’m not immune. Our daddy wasn’t, either.”

“What about your mother?” Edwards asks.

Maggie folds her arms in spite of the cast and glares at him. “My mom died in a car accident before I started kindergarten,” she informs him. “My stepmom got infected with the zombie virus and died in the first week of the outbreak. It’s just Beth. No one else.”

Edwards doesn’t show any indication that he can tell she’s lying through her teeth; instead he smooths his expression out until his face is devoid of any emotion. Dawn frowns, high brow furrowing and mouth flatlining as she presses her lips together.

Maggie huffs. “If you’re gonna torture me for information,” she says tersely, “get it over with.”

* * *

Dawn stares at Maggie for a moment that fulminates with shrewd tension before she orders her to get back to work. Edwards sends the girls to the laundry room to find something clean for Joan to wear. Beth clutches the dirty clothes to her chest, hands shaking and fingers snarling with impotent rage.

“You okay?” the gangly boy ironing the wrinkles out of a bland gray sheet asks as she shuts the door behind her.

Beth ducks her head and nods as Maggie gets a bottle of stain remover from a shelf and spritzes the bloodstained shirt before she drops it unceremoniously into the hamper.

“I’m Noah,” the gangly boy says and flips the iron upright to avoid burning the sheet before he adds, “of the Lollipop Guild. I figured you could use a pick-me-up after this morning,” he flicks his gaze to the stitches on her cheek and frowns with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it twist of his mouth, “guess I should’ve brought the whole jar. Here,” he offers her a pile of drab scrubs for Joan, “this should fit your patient.”

Beth can’t bring herself to smile at him, even though he seems perfectly nice. Lucy always says the kindness of strangers is a vital component of survival in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but that strangers can become enemies at the drop of a hat. Noah might have ulterior motives, and she’s too jaded to think he gave her candy out of the goodness of his heart. “Beth,” she says by way of introduction. “Thanks for that.”

“What happened to Joan?” Maggie asks him. “If she’d have stayed and worked for a while, couldn’t she have just left eventually?”

Noah shakes his head slowly. “I haven’t seen it work like that yet,” he admits.

“How long have you been here?” Beth wants to know.

Noah shrugs. “Just about a year,” he says before he turns and yanks up the leg of his pants to show them a livid red line of scar tissue slashed from the hollow behind his knee to his ankle. “Dad and I were both pretty messed up when they found us, and they said they could only save one. I believed them for the longest time, but now I get it. Dad was bigger, stronger—he would’ve fought back, would’ve been a threat.”

“So they just left him to die,” Maggie deduces with a sharp edge in her voice.

Noah ducks his head and nods. “Dawn just looked the other way,” he tells her softly. “See, she’s in charge, but just barely, and it’s getting worse. Which is why I’m outta here when the time is right. I came to Atlanta to find my uncle, but I gotta get back home.”

“Where’s that?” Beth wants to know.

Noah grins. “Richmond, Virginia. We had walls,” he hunches over the ironing board and lowers his voice. “See,” he whispers conspiratorially, “these cops think I’m scrawny—they think I’m weak—but they don’t know shit about me, about what I am…” he glances at Maggie and says, “…about what you are.”

“What do you think we are?” Maggie asks him.

Noah gives her a knowing look. “You’re survivors,” he says. “Just like me.”

* * *

Beth is assigned a custodial job. It’s awkward with one of her arms in a cast, but she has faith that her situation is only temporary. Beth had lost her earpiece when Gorman crashed his patrol car into her, but Maggie snuck her radio in. Glenn was planning on getting Alec to boost the range so they can transmit information to Lucy, to let their commander know exactly what they’re up against. If they were able to set up a network of repeaters and bidirectional amplifiers, Glenn is going to check in with Maggie at midnight. Otherwise, they’ll be tuning into static. It’s only a matter of time.

Guillermo, the head custodian, tells her to call him G and jokes with her while they mop in the hallways under the scrutiny of the fluorescent lights. Unlike the creeps who call themselves cops, he has a quiet strength with a dash of subtle charisma that makes her think she might be able to trust him. Joan doesn’t even flinch when he walks by the locked door of her bedroom with his keys jingling softly in the pocket of his dull uniform, and that makes Beth think her instincts about him were right.

 _No_ , Beth tells herself as she shuffles into a storage closet to mix another bottle of bleach solution, _don’t get attached. Maggie and I might have to fight our way out of this place. If that happens, we won’t be able to save everyone_.

Dawn steps into the storage closet and eyes the sisters with suspicion behind their backs for a few seconds before she smooths her expression out into a fake smile. “Shepherd,” she says, “you’ve already pulled a double. I’ve got it from here.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Shepherd clenches her jaw and muffles a yawn through sheer force of will as she leaves the room. “Thanks.”

Beth slowly puts the bottle of water down and eyes the policewoman with barely concealed suspicion. Maggie glances at the holster on her right hip—her hands are full so maybe she wouldn’t be able to stop her from blindsiding her and taking her sidearm. Beth shakes her head because Shepherd is still in the hall outside the door.

“I know you didn’t have breakfast.” Dawn slides the plastic tray of food in her hands onto a shelf devoid of noxious chemicals. “Peace treaty?”

Beth shakes her head again. “We don’t need much,” she says. “We’re not staying any longer than you make us.”

Dawn sits on top of a red storage container and pats the makeshift seat beside her, head cocked like a predatory bird perched on a tree branch catching sight of its prey. Beth awkwardly sits down next to her while Maggie stays with her back against the opposite wall. Dawn shifts her weight and turns in her seat until her knee bumps into Beth’s knee—it seems like the body language of someone that wants to have a conversation on the same level, but it actually gives her arm the mobility for a crossdraw and a potential hostage. “You know,” she says with fake nonchalance, “you girls shouldn’t see this as a sentence. I’m giving you food, clothes, protection. When have those things ever been free?”

 _There’s a difference between offering food and clothes and protection in exchange for labor_ , Maggie snaps in her mind, _and forcing people to work for you after you hit them with your car and put them in the hospital_. “We didn’t ask for your help,” she says out loud.

Dawn stifles a sneer. “No,” she says, “but you needed it.” Beth looks away from her shrewd gaze and hunches her shoulders defensively. “Try to look at the good we’re doing,” Dawn insists, “we saved Joan’s life. Trevitt’s life.”

Beth tries not to stare at her incredulously. “ _I_ saved Joan’s life,” she says, “and her arm.”

“Yes,” Dawn acquiesces with a hint of annoyance in her voice, “but we saved your life. I’m keeping all of us going here—that is not a small thing. It’s taken a lot to get us here. I believe that what he had before all of this isn’t over, and when we’re finally rescued—when this nightmare ends—we’re gonna need to rebuild.”

Beth frowns and tries not to let the sheer enormity of her disbelief show on her face. “You don’t really think someone’s coming for us?” she asks.

“There’s still people like us,” Dawn says, “people that are trying to keep the world alive, to fix it. Until then we all have to contribute, to compromise—if we take, we give back. It’s only fair.”

Beth swallows hard. _I guess she thinks getting raped is one way the girls here are supposed to ‘give back,’_ she thinks, _but that’s not a compromise. It’s just wrong_.

“So keep working off what you owe and you’ll be out of here in no time,” Dawn says and slants her gaze to Maggie up against the wall before she adds, “if that’s what you want.”

Maggie nods, a sharp descent of her chin. “It’s what we want,” she echoes.

“Well,” Dawn says, “then you have to eat. Otherwise, you’ll get weak—you won’t heal, you’ll require more treatment, and you won’t be able to work. I know you girls didn’t ask for any of this,” she lowers her voice like she’s revealing one of her dirty little secrets before she adds, “I didn’t either.”

Beth stares at her with a strange look in her eyes as she takes a fork and eats a bite of guinea pig jerky from one of the plates on the tray in front of her. Maggie comes to sit on the storage bin next to her as Dawn walks away.

 _Always let monsters think you’re weak_ , Lucy had told her once. _If you want to survive, don’t let them know that you have the strength to fight back until you’re sure you can use it_.

* * *

After they eat lunch, Beth and Maggie split up and mop the floors of the hospital that aren’t overrun by the walking dead. Maggie goes up the stairs while Beth stays on the bottom level and they agree to meet in the middle. Joan wakes up when she hears Beth humming and makes a groggy noise. “That’s really nice,” she murmurs.

Beth props the handle of the mop up against the wall and steps around the scuffed yellow bucketful of bleach solution. “I’ll get Dr. Edwards,” she says.

Joan groans as Beth turns and moves toward the open doorway. “No,” she rasps, “please…not yet.”

Beth looks down at the IV drip attached to her forearm, the bag devoid of her curative blood hanging from a metal hook. Joan still has two arms, but in a way that might be a curse instead of a blessing. If she were deformed, maybe Gorman would stop raping her—or maybe that would only make her more vulnerable.

Joan smiles ruefully. “Dawn,” she murmurs, “she can control them, but she doesn’t because it’s easier…because she’s a coward.”

“What did he do to you?” Beth asks.

Joan shakes her head feebly. “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “I guess it’s easy to make a deal with the devil if you’re not the one paying the price.”

 _God_ , Beth thinks and swallows around the lump in her throat, her faith caught somewhere between prayer and profanity. _Please help her survive long enough for Lucy and Carol and Andrea and Gilda to show her that getting raped isn’t the end of the world_.

* * *

Beth stops by the room where she woke up and is about to look under the mattress of the hospital bed for the lollipop Noah slipped her in the laundry room. There’s still a ticking clock on the wall counting down the seconds to midnight one tock at a time. Beth frowns when she can’t feel anything underneath the mattress and flinches at the foreboding sound of footsteps coming up behind her. Suddenly the song Dr. Edwards was playing comes back to haunt her: _you better run, don’t let him get you_ / _if he gets you, babe, he gonna rape you_.

“Lose something?” Gorman asks as he twirls the stick of the lollipop in between his thick fingers. Somehow he makes taking candy from a teenage girl downright menacing. “This is yours, isn’t it?” he says. Beth squares her shoulders and forces herself not to flinch or back away from him. Gorman unwraps the lollipop with a crinkle of plastic and sucks on it with a _mmm_ sound that makes panic surge in her chest. “Sour apple,” he says, “like the kind Dawn acquired from pediatrics. Suppose you could have a taste,” he suggests and takes a few steps toward her until he’s in her personal space and offers the sucker to her. “See if it rings any bells.”

Beth gulps as bile rises in her throat, unadulterated disgust and repugnant powerlessness choking her. “I don’t want it,” she says.

“Oh,” Gorman coaxes and caresses her lips with the lollipop while he leers at her. “Come on, now. I just wanna be sure I’m returning this to its rightful owner—”

Maggie chooses that moment to sneak up behind him, snap his gun out of its holster, and put the barrel against the back of his head before she clicks the safety off. “You take your hands off my sister,” she tells him in a voice that vibrates with fury, “right now. You hear me?”

“Leave them alone,” Edwards says, backing them up.

Gorman holds his hands up in mock surrender and drops the lollipop onto the floor that Beth just mopped. “This little girl should have been mine,” he says.

“Nobody’s yours, Gorman.” Edwards frowns as his upper lip twitches with disgust that mirrors the look that both sisters are wearing like it never goes out of style. “Nobody. If you think you’re getting Joan back—”

Gorman turns and smirks at him as Maggie steps in between him and Beth with his own sidearm aimed point blank at his face. “Oh,” he says, “I’m gonna get her back. You think Dawn’s gonna stop me?”

“I will,” Edwards tells him as his Adam’s apple bobs anxiously in his throat.

Gorman sniggers. “You stepping up, Doc?” he asks.

“What happens when you get sick, Gorman?” Edwards asks and answers his question with another question while he stares down his nose at the shorter—and smaller in every way that matters in the grand scheme of things—man. “When you get an infection? When you get bit?”

Maggie doesn’t waver as she keeps the pistol aimed at his big mouth. “Beth’s not a universal donor,” she says, “but maybe you shouldn’t do anything that would make her want to let you die. Just in case.”

“I think there’s gonna be somebody,” Gorman retorts, “somebody who ain’t you, Doc.”

Dawn walks by the open doorway with her lieutenant and shoots him a warning look. “Gorman,” she says.

“I think there’s gonna be somebody,” he echoes as Dawn stops to linger in the doorway and narrows her eyes at Maggie, “and maybe somebody in charge who ain’t her.”


	25. Some Girls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sorry this chapter took me forever. It’s still because of the same reasons: depression, lack of motivation, hijacked by other things, all that jazz. I haven’t caught up with _TWD_ , either. On the bright side, the plot kicks back in next chapter so I actually get to rewrite stuff instead of just showcasing how terrible Grady Memorial is. I’m just hoping it doesn’t take me another six months to write it.
> 
> Thanks to all y’all for putting up with me and, hopefully, for being here now that I’m back on my bullshit. MaCall out.

**Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,**   
**but also the truth. Because who would believe**   
**the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival**   
**those who were never meant**   
**to survive?**

Joy Harjo, “Anchorage”

* * *

 _Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 4**  
Not Fade Away  
**Vol. XII**  
_Too Far Gone_  
**Chapter 25**  
Some Girls

* * *

 _Wednesday, 15 November 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 520._  
_Atlanta, GA;_  
_Grady Memorial Hospital._

* * *

Beth didn’t care for Lucy at first. There was something irreverent and disrespectful about her, something almost blasphemous. Lucy, who survived being infected with a virus that killed billions of people in the span of a few weeks at the beginning of the end of the world. Lucy, with her sharp mind and her blood like magic. Lucy, who doesn’t believe in God.

Still, her lack of faith in a higher power didn’t make her unkind. Lucy is strong because she has faith in herself and in the people that she chooses to surround herself with. It’s why their people trust in her ability as a leader: because she understands that everyone has their own skills and their own strengths. There are certain strengths that are more conducive to survival than others at first glance, but no one capable of living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland is useless.

Maggie is physically stronger than her, but that doesn’t make Beth weak. Beth is a survivor in the same way Lucy is: traumatized but healing. Always healing.

Immune. Unbroken. Indomitable.

Strong.

Unfortunately, their strengths aren’t enough to stop men like Gorman from making her feel powerless or save the slaves at Grady Memorial from the cops keeping them prisoner. Maggie is lucky Dawn let her off with a warning, instead of punishing her because she held one of the officers at gunpoint. Beth was shocked the lieutenant didn’t arrest her sister or sentence her to something worse than solitary confinement in a cell, but undermining and cockblocking Gorman was apparently more important to her than making an example of girls who fight back against potential rapists. It makes her worry more about Joan, defenseless and exhausted in a room where Gorman can find her.

 _If you want to survive_ , Lucy had told her once, _use what you have and find the people who have whatever else you need_.

There are people at Grady who don’t agree with how things are done. Noah. Guillermo. Joan. Maggie. Beth herself. Probably the four other female wards, whose soul-sucking jobs involve both grueling manual labor and being sexually assaulted in order to keep the officers happy and satisfied until they’re saved and make their exodus to some ephemeral brighter future Dawn has to believe in because otherwise she would fall apart. Maybe the doctor who stood up for them instead of victimizing them.

 _There are thirteen cops_ , Beth thinks, _including Dawn. Trevitt is the only patient, and he’s circling the drain. There’s one doctor—Edwards—and nine wards, including me and Maggie. We’re outnumbered and outgunned, but maybe I can even the odds a little_.

“Why do you stay?” she asks Dr. Edwards as soon as Dawn and her lackeys are out of earshot.

Maggie nods and stares at him with her green eyes narrowed into slits of suspicion. “Why stay here when you could just leave whenever you want?” she echoes.

Edwards doesn’t verbally answer their question; he adjusts his glasses and tucks his hands in the pocket of his white coat before he turns and walks out of the hospital room instead. Beth and Maggie exchange a look before they unanimously decide to follow him. Edwards makes a sharp turn and uses a tarnished key to unlock the door to the emergency exit stairwell and slowly descends into the darkness below. “Welcome to the ground floor of Grady Memorial Hospital,” he says as they approach a vent guarded by lines of steel piping. Geometric shards of light filter in through metal slats caked with layers of dust, creating a stark grid of chiaroscuro on the floor. “This isn’t a way out,” he clarifies as Maggie peers in between the slats and Beth squints at the shadows. “There isn’t one. Not from here.”

“Why’d you bring us here?” Beth wants to know.

Edwards bends to pick up a metal pipe and scrapes one end along the slats hard enough to make them both startle at the reverberating dissonance of the sound. “Watch,” he says.

Beth knows what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t stop her or Maggie from falling for the jumpscare and flinching when the zombies slam against the grate on the other side of the slats. These shamblers look fresher than anything they saw outside the hospital, so they’ve gotta be well-fed.

Edwards puts the pipe back down and heaves a sigh. “When I start thinking about it too much,” he says, “I come down here to look at this.”

“Why’d you bring us here?” Maggie says, her voice a terse echo of the question her sister asked before.

Edwards turns and looks at her with a solemn expression on his face. “You asked why I stay,” he says gravely. “Come on. Let me tell you a story.”

* * *

After descending into the hellish darkness in the belly of the beast that is Grady Memorial, Edwards brings them all the way up the stairs to the garden on the roof. Beth spots a sentry on the rooftop of the skyscraper towering above them. There are slices of fruit drying in the sun and damp laundry pinned to a clothesline. Edwards had shucked his white coat in his office and he shoves his hands in the pockets of his faded jeans when he walks. “When everything started,” he says, “Dawn reported to a guy named Hanson. Atlanta P. D. had orders to clear the hospital and move everyone to Butler Park. It was close to midnight when we heard the jets, the bombs…the screams. I was on the third floor. Dawn and Hanson’s teams were doing a final sweep and we knew it was bad. Just didn’t know how bad ’til we came up here—”

Beth stares out at the ruins of Atlanta, the cityscape decayed in some horrible ways but thriving in others. There’s an overgrowth of ivy creeping up the side of one decrepit apartment building and every tree she can see is still growing. _This was the end of the world as we knew it_ , Lucy had told her once, _but it’s not the end of everything—not as long as we’re still breathing_.

“—the city had fallen,” Edwards says, “and everyone we evacuated…they were just…gone. We kept mostly to ourselves at first,” he stoops to sit on the edge of the rooftop with his back hunched away from the ruins, “’til the food ran out. We started going on runs, a few of us at a time. We’d see people who needed help, barely holding on, but we were barely holding on ourselves. There came a time when I couldn’t look away anymore. I found this kid with burns on his clothes, his skin. Dawn said we couldn’t spare the resources, so we struck a deal. I’d use what I could to heal him, and he’d compensate us for those resources through his service. Now…”

Maggie watches him pick up pieces of gravel and let the rocks slip through his fingertips. “You’re part of the problem,” she mutters.

“We lost people,” Edwards says and rises to his feet before he shoves his hands back in his pockets, “that was the problem. Hanson cracked and made some calls that got people killed. Dawn took care of things. She took care of him.” Beth gulps softly and blinks at him as the implication behind those words sinks in. “She saw us past it and kept us together, kept us alive.”

Beth looks away, snapping the tenuous thread of eye contact and trying to hide the tension taking root in her spine. “You call this living?” she asks him incredulously.

“We’re still breathing,” Edwards points out as he adjusts his glasses with one finger off to the side of the plastic frames, “the people we brought here as patients are still breathing. Outside these walls alone, unprotected, they’d be dead. We’d be dead. We’re not the ones who make it and as bad as it gets in here,” he glances over the edge of the roof before he says, “it’s still better than down there.”

Maggie can see how badly her sister wants to tell Edwards about Lucy, who’s the epitome of the ones who shouldn’t’ve made it: fat, mobility-impaired, autistic, incapable of functioning without her SSRI medication, allergic to the oligosaccharides in red meat and myosin light chains in white meat. Fish is the only animal protein she can eat. No beef, pork, lamb, mutton, chicken, turkey, duck, goose, boar, rabbit, venison or veal. Lucy is also a visionary, especially compared to these people and their hollow justifications for creating a corrupt system with a brutal mentality left over from a world that ended almost two years ago. Where the survivors at Grady Memorial saw a desperate need to cling to the remnants of a morally bankrupt capitalist society in which slavery was legal as punishment for a crime, Lucy saw their shot at a revolution. Beth is smart enough not to share too much information with the doctor, even though she wants to. “We should get back,” she murmurs. “We’ve still got jobs to do.”

Edwards takes his hands out of his pockets and exhales a noise caught somewhere between a breath and a sigh. “How about you look in on Mr. Trevitt and call it a day?  He’s stable, due for another seventy-five milligrams of Clozapine.”

Maggie nods. “Okay,” she says.

Edwards smiles at them both with the clouds ominously brewing in the sky behind him. “Tomorrow we’ll start fresh,” he says.

“Sure,” Beth tells him before she turns and walks away.

* * *

When she administers the Clozapine and Trevitt has a seizure, Beth could’ve kicked herself for doing what Edwards said without so much as reading the warnings on the bottle of pills before she crushed them up with a mortar and pestle and injected him with the diluted concoction. Her daddy would’ve been so disappointed in her. Noah is smiling at her from the doorway with a mop in one hand and a bucket in the other when the heart monitor starts beeping frantically and Beth stares in horror at Trevitt, his body pulsing with paroxysms that almost snap his arms and legs out of the restraints on his wrists and ankles.

Carol took her on a pharmacy run once and they had found Clozapine behind the counter. It’s an atypical antipsychotic—more potent than a typical antipsychotic—often used to treat schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Clozapine has warnings for agranulocytosis, leukopenia, neutropenia, dementia, myelotoxicity, hypotension, myocarditis, and seizures.

Beth didn’t remember any of that until she watched Mr. Trevitt die screaming around the ET tube in his throat and he didn’t stop convulsing until approximately thirty seconds afterward. It was the longest thirty seconds of her life.

Dawn stomps into the room in time for the corpse in the bed to lose control of his bladder and piss himself; she frowns and scrunches up her nose in disgust before she grabs a pair of scissors and stabs him in the head to stop him from rising again. Beth tries not to flinch when the lieutenant turns around. Dawn glares at her with the bloodsoaked scissors clutched in her hand, her knuckles clenched white and bloodless in contrast with the viscous red. “What did you do to him?” she asks.

Beth opens her mouth and shuts it, her throat working soundlessly. “I…” she blurts, her voice pitching higher in distress.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Maggie cuts in.

Dawn shifts the focus of her scowl and inadvertently sprays droplets of blood onto the sheets as she points the scissors at them. “Mr. Trevitt was fine until you two were alone with him,” she retorts, “something happened. I want you to tell me—”

“It was an accident,” Noah interjects. “Beth and Maggie left to get some gauze. I was mopping, but I must’ve unplugged the ventilator somehow. It only stopped for a minute. I got it working again.”

Beth shakes her head. “But that’s—” she protests before Noah shuts her up with a look.

“Take him to my office,” Dawn orders as she looks past all of them to the officer standing in the hallway.

Gorman nods and grabs Noah by the elbow. Beth flicks her gaze to her sister, her eyes going wide as fear squeezes deep in her chest; they both know white cops and black people are never a good combination, especially in places like Atlanta. It’s the end of the world, but that hasn’t changed.

“Dawn,” Edwards says urgently. “It was an accident. _It was an accident_.”

Beth grabs his sleeve as Dawn stomps out of the room. “No,” she tells him, “that’s not what happened. He just started having seizures.”

“Well,” Edwards says, “you gave him Clonazepam, right?”

Beth shakes her head. “Cloz…” she gulps before she says, “…Clozapine. You said Clozapine.”

“No.” Edwards shakes his head. “I didn’t.”

Maggie tilts her chin up and looks him dead in the eyes. “You said Clozapine,” she retorts, “seventy-five milligrams.”

“Beth!” Edwards flings his arm out to stop her from running down the hallway at the sound of Noah screaming. “We need to deal with Mr. Trevitt while he’s still warm,” he says and yanks her back as she thrashes against his hold.

“No!” Beth shakes her head and struggles as Noah yells _Please, stop!_ and Maggie flinches. “I have to stop it! Please!” she echoes desperately.

“We can’t,” Edwards says. “You can’t stop it.”

 _Yes we can_ , Maggie tells herself, _and we will_.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you want to see where the fourquel is going, please click the kudos button and take the time to leave a comment and validate me. I swear I won’t bite. Not like a zombie would, anyway.


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